My Sister Sold Our Dying Mother’s House Behind My Back — Then Mom Made One Phone Call

I got her the address book from the drawer in the kitchen where she’d kept it for as long as I could remember. Green leather, worn soft at the corners, a rubber band around it because the spine had given up somewhere around 2015.

She flipped through it slowly. Her hands trembled. Not from nerves — from the disease. Her hands had trembled for months.

She landed on a page in the H’s.

“Katie, dial this for me. My eyes.”

The name at the top of the page was *Howard Levinson.*

I knew that name.

Howard Levinson had been my father’s attorney. He had drawn up my parents’ wills the year I graduated high school. He had handled the probate on my grandmother’s estate. He had come to my father’s funeral in a black suit with a Cleveland Indians pin on the lapel because my dad had loved the Indians.

I hadn’t known he was still alive. He had to be eighty by now.

I dialed. I put it on speaker and set it on the arm of her recliner.

He picked up on the second ring. “Levinson.”

“Howard. It’s Marjorie Malone.”

A beat. Then, warmer than anything I had heard on a phone in weeks: “Marjorie. Oh, honey. How are you feeling today?”

“I’m dying, Howard, but I’m dying on schedule, so I can’t complain. Listen. I need you to do something for me, and I need you to do it before five o’clock.”

“Name it.”

“Rebecca has sold my house.”

The silence on the other end of that phone was the silence of a man who had already been half-expecting this call.

“Marjorie,” he said carefully. “When did she do that?”

“Listed this morning. But she got me to sign the power of attorney in November. Deed transfer in December. Katie just saw the listing on the internet.”

“Katie’s with you?”

“I’m here, Mr. Levinson,” I said.

“Katie, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. Your mother told me you gave up your job to come home. That was a good thing you did.”

I couldn’t answer him without crying, so I didn’t.

“Marjorie,” he said, “do you remember what we did in October?”

“I remember, Howard. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Do you want to tell Katie, or should I?”

My mother looked at me. Her eyes were the clearest they had been in a week.

“You tell her, Howard. I’m tired.”

Howard cleared his throat. On the other end of the line, I could hear him settling into a chair, could hear the creak of leather.

“Katie. In early October, before your mother’s diagnosis was public, she asked me to come to the house. She was already suspicious of some things. She wouldn’t tell me what. She had me draw up a revocable living trust — the Marjorie Malone Family Trust. She transferred the deed to the house into that trust on October 11th, along with her savings account, her CDs, and the mineral rights on the eighty acres your grandfather left her in Guernsey County.”

“Wait,” I said. “October eleventh?”

“Yes.”

“But — Rebecca had her sign a deed transfer in December.”

“Rebecca had her sign a deed transfer for a house Marjorie no longer legally owned.”

The world went quiet.

Mom was watching my face. She was, I realized with a shock, almost smiling. The faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.

“Howard,” she said, “explain the trustee part.”

“Marjorie is the trustee of the trust during her lifetime. Katie, you are the successor trustee. Rebecca is a beneficiary, but the trust dictates specific terms — I’ll get to those. What matters right now, today, is that the listing your sister put up this morning is legally invalid. She had no authority to sell that house. She signed a document representing herself as the owner when she is not, and was not, the owner.”

“That’s — ” I couldn’t find the word.

“That’s fraud, Katie,” Howard said gently. “Real estate fraud. It’s a felony in Ohio.”

Mom coughed. It went on longer than it should have. I got her water. She waved off the straw and just took the glass in both hands and sipped.

“Howard,” she said when she caught her breath, “I don’t want my daughter to go to prison.”

“I understand.”

“But I want her to understand what she did. And I want it on the record. Legally. So that when I’m gone, there is no question about anything.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to call the listing agent — Bright Path — this afternoon and inform them the seller does not hold title. I want you to send Rebecca a letter, certified, informing her that the power of attorney is revoked as of today, and that the December deed transfer she executed is void. And I want you to email me the terms of the trust so I can go over them with Katie tonight while I still can.”

“Consider it done, Marjorie.”

She hung up. She let her head fall back against the recliner.

“Mama,” I said. “You knew.”

“I suspected, sweetheart. I’ve known your sister for forty-one years.” She closed her eyes. “The peacoat woman in December. You told me about her. A county assessor doesn’t take pictures of the inside of a house at Christmas. I knew then. I just didn’t know what to do about it yet.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She opened her eyes.

“Because, Katie, I needed to be sure. And because — ” her voice caught ” — because I didn’t want you to spend the last weeks of my life fighting with your sister. I wanted these weeks to be *ours.*”

I lay my head down on the arm of her recliner and I cried the way I had not let myself cry since October.

She stroked my hair with a hand that weighed almost nothing.

“There, there, baby. There, there. Mama’s not done yet.”

—

Rebecca called seventeen times between two and five that afternoon.

I didn’t answer. Mom didn’t want me to.

At 5:42 p.m., a certified letter was, according to Howard, in the FedEx system, overnighted to Rebecca’s condo in Charlotte.

At 6:15 p.m., Rebecca called from a number I didn’t recognize.

I answered because I thought it might be the hospice nurse.

“Katherine,” my sister said. Not Katie. Katherine. She only used that name when she was performing.

“Rebecca.”

“I don’t know what game you and Mom think you are playing, but I have a real estate attorney and I have documents and I am not going to be — “

“Becca.”

“— bullied by a sister who has always been jealous of me and a mother who has always — “

“Becca. Mom set up a trust in October. The house wasn’t hers to transfer in December.”

The silence on that phone call was one of the most satisfying sounds of my entire life.

“That’s not — she wouldn’t — “

“Howard Levinson has the paperwork. He filed the trust with the county in October. It’s a public record. You can look it up tonight.”

“Howard Levinson is a *hundred years old.*”

“He’s seventy-nine and he answers his own phone. Goodnight, Becca.”

I hung up. Mom, from the recliner, said without opening her eyes:

“Was that satisfying, sweetheart?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Good. Now come read to me. I want to hear the Wendell Berry poems.”

I read to her until she fell asleep, and I did not know it then, but that was the last full evening my mother would ever be lucid.

The next morning, everything changed.

—