My Three Kids Voted to Sell My House While I Was in the Hospital. They Forgot Who Signed the Deed in 1978.
Part 1
I was still hooked up to the heart monitor when my daughter told me she had already called a realtor.
Beth said it the way you’d mention picking up milk. Sitting in the visitor chair, phone face down on her knee, her purse in her lap like she wasn’t planning to stay long.
“Mom, we’ve been talking. Michael and Danny and I. And we think it’s time.”
“Time for what.”
“For the house.”
I stared at the ceiling tile above her head. There was a water stain shaped like Ohio.
“The doctors said this is the second episode in a year,” she went on. “You can’t be alone in that big house anymore. It isn’t safe. It isn’t fair to us either, worrying every time the phone rings.”
“I’m not dead yet, Beth.”
“Mom.”
“I had a dizzy spell.”
“You had atrial fibrillation and you passed out on the kitchen floor for six hours before Mrs. Halloran found you. And she only found you because the dog wouldn’t stop crying at the fence.”
I closed my eyes.
My husband Ray built that house in 1978. He was thirty-one years old and I was twenty-nine and we had two babies and one on the way and a plot of land his uncle sold us for a dollar because his uncle liked the way Ray shook hands. Ray poured the foundation himself. He tiled the kitchen backsplash on his knees while I held the level. The oak tree in the front yard was a stick when we planted it and now it shades half the roof.
“We found a place in Westbrook,” Beth said. “Assisted living, but the nice kind. Danny’s already toured it. They have a garden.”
“Danny toured it.”
“Yes.”
“Danny lives in Denver.”
“He flew in last weekend, Mom.”
Last weekend. My son had been in Ohio and hadn’t come to see me.
“The realtor thinks we can list it in three weeks,” Beth said. “There’s already interest from a developer who wants the lot. Michael ran the numbers. After the assisted living deposit and splitting what’s left, we can each. Well. It would help. Danny’s got the twins starting college and Michael’s business is.”
She stopped. She had the decency, at least, to stop.
“You already picked the place,” I said.
“We put down a hold.”
“With what money.”
She didn’t answer that.
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at her, really looked. Forty-six years old. Same stubborn chin as her father. She was wearing the pearl earrings I gave her when she graduated law school. She’d used my money to hold a room in a facility I hadn’t agreed to move to.
“Where are your brothers.”
“They’re on a call. A three-way. They wanted me to come in person because.” She swallowed. “Because I’m the lawyer. And because they thought you’d take it better from me.”
I laughed. It came out thin and mean and it made the monitor beep faster and a nurse poked her head in and I waved her off.
“Beth. Honey. Get my purse.”
“Mom, don’t be difficult about this. Please. We love you. This isn’t.”
“Get my purse.”
She got it. I pulled out my little leather address book, the one I’d carried since 1985, and I found the name I wanted and I picked up the room phone and I dialed.
“Frank,” I said. “It’s Margaret Delaney. I’m at Mercy. No, I’m fine, I’m fine. Listen. I need you to come down here tomorrow morning and bring the file. The 1978 file. Yes. The one from the second drawer.”
I hung up.
Beth was staring at me. “Who was that.”
“Your father’s lawyer.”
“Dad’s lawyer died in 2009.”
“His son took over the practice. Same name. Frank Junior.”
“Mom, what file.”
I set the address book down on the tray table next to the plastic pitcher of ice water and the wilted arrangement Michael had wired from Cleveland.
“Beth,” I said, “when your father and I bought that land in 1978, do you know whose name is on the deed?”
She frowned. “Both of yours. Obviously.”
“No, honey.”
I watched her face.
“Just mine.”
—