The Notary at Mother’s Birthday Supper

My brother laid the paper down next to our mother’s plate the way you would set down a napkin.

It was legal size, longer than the placemat, and he squared it with one finger so the bottom edge lined up with her fork. Then he took a blue pen out of his shirt pocket, clicked it, and set it on top.

“Before cake, Mom,” Kyle said. “Two minutes. It’s just paperwork. Keeps things simple later.”

Mom looked at the paper. She did not pick it up.

Her reading glasses were hanging on their chain against her good blouse, the lavender one she wore to church that morning. She had a little gravy on her thumb and she wiped it on her napkin, slowly, the way she does everything.

“What kind of paperwork?” she said.

“House stuff. So the state doesn’t get tangled up in it down the road. Everybody’s doing it.” He nodded across the table. “That’s why I brought Hailey. She makes it official, you sign, we eat cake.”

That was the first any of us had heard why Hailey was there.

She had come in behind Kyle and Dana and the kids at five o’clock, a young woman in a navy blazer with a canvas bag over her shoulder, and Kyle had said, “This is Hailey, she works at the credit union in Fremont, I told her she had to try Mom’s roast.” We set another place. Nobody in my family has ever asked a guest to explain herself at the door.

Now Hailey reached into the canvas bag and took out a round stamp and a small black ledger book and put them on the table in front of her, next to the creamed corn. She looked like she wished she had been told it was a birthday.

I was sitting two chairs down from my mother. My husband Mark was beside me. Under the table he put his hand flat on my knee, which after nineteen years I can read like a road sign. It meant, wait.

So I waited about four seconds. Long enough to read the top line of the page upside down.

It said QUITCLAIM DEED.

What I knew and what I did not

I am a dental hygienist. I clean teeth four days a week at Dr. Hansen’s office in West Point, and I can tell you more than you want to know about your gums. I cannot tell you much about deeds.

But I grew up in that kitchen with a mother who spent thirty-one years as a deputy in the Burt County Clerk’s office in Tekamah. In a county our size the clerk is the register of deeds too, so every farm that sold, every house that passed from a dead father to his children, every divorce that split forty acres down the middle crossed her counter. She stamped it, she indexed it, she put it in the book.

She did not bring that work home much. But a child picks things up.

One thing I had picked up was that she did not like quitclaim deeds between family. I could hear her at this very table when I was maybe fifteen, telling Dad about some poor woman who had signed one for a nephew. “It says exactly what it says and it does it the minute it’s recorded,” she told him. “People think it’s a form. It’s a door, and it only swings one way.”

So I knew that much. I knew what kind of paper it was.