My Three Kids Voted to Put Me in Memory Care. They Didn’t Know I Still Owned the House.
Part 3: The Measuring
I did not open the door immediately.
Susan and I stood in the front hallway, out of sight from the sidelights, and we watched Kathy from Coldwell Banker ring the bell a second time. She had a Rolodex smile and a laser measuring tool and, tucked under her arm, a lockbox.
A lockbox. To put on my front door. Without asking me.
“Marlene,” Susan whispered, “when did you agree to a listing.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then she doesn’t have a listing agreement.”
“No.”
“Then she is trespassing.”
I opened the door.
Kathy’s smile activated like a motion light. “Mrs. Whitaker. I’m so sorry, I was expecting Rachel to meet me here, she said the key would be under the,”
“Rachel is not on the deed to this house.”
The smile flickered. “I’m sorry, what.”
“Rachel is my daughter. She is not on the deed. She has no authority to list this home or to give you a key or to be under any illusion that she can hire you. What did she tell you.”
Kathy looked down at her clipboard the way people look at their phones when they wish they could disappear into them.
“She said, um, she said she had power of attorney for her mother, who was moving into a memory care facility at the end of the month, and that we needed to get comps and photos before the family holidays because,”
“Kathy.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I am the mother. Do I appear to be moving into memory care.”
Susan stepped up behind me. “Ms. Coldwell Banker, I’m Susan Klein, Mrs. Whitaker’s attorney. Mrs. Whitaker owns this home outright through a revocable living trust. Her daughter has no legal authority over it. If you list this property or return to this address, we will contact your broker and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. Do you understand.”
Kathy’s face had gone the color of the underside of a mushroom.
“I,”
“Do you understand.”
“Yes.”
“Please leave the lockbox.”
Kathy handed over the lockbox like it was radioactive and walked backward down the porch steps. Her car was out of the driveway in under a minute.
Susan closed the door.
“Well,” she said. “Now they know we know something.”
“They don’t know what we know.”
“No. Just that Kathy failed. Which means Rachel is about to call you.”
My phone rang forty minutes later.
I let it go to voicemail. Then I let it ring six more times over the next two hours. Then Rachel started texting.
Mom what happened with Kathy
Mom please call me
Mom Danny says if you don’t answer we’re driving over
I typed back, finally, one sentence.
*Come to dinner Saturday the 22nd at six. All of you. Bring Ted and Karen and Ashley. I’ll make pot roast.*
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.
*Mom are you okay*
*Six o’clock. Don’t be late.*
I put the phone face down on the counter.
Susan poured herself a small glass of the wine she’d brought “for later,” which was now, and slid one across to me.
“You’re enjoying this,” I said.
“Marlene. I have been your lawyer for eleven years. I watched you sign that trust in your husband’s hospice room while he squeezed your hand and made you promise. I have thought about this trust, in the abstract, once a quarter for eleven years. I did not know if it would ever be used. And now three grown adults with graduate degrees are about to walk into your dining room thinking they’re going to sell your house.”
“Susan.”
“I am not enjoying this. I am prepared for this.”
“That’s the same thing when it’s you.”
She raised her glass. “To Bill.”
“To Bill.”
We clinked.
The next twelve days were the strangest of my life.
Rachel called every day. I answered sometimes. I kept the conversations short and light. She wanted to know if I was okay, if I understood the plan, if I was still on board for the move.
I said things like, *I’m looking forward to seeing everyone Saturday.*
*Mom, are you angry.*
*I’m making pot roast, Rachel. And that green bean thing your father liked.*
*Mom.*
*Six o’clock.*
Danny called from Denver twice. He used what I think of as his depositions voice, careful and even. He asked if I had spoken to a lawyer. I said I speak to lots of people. He asked if I was going to make Saturday “difficult.” I said Saturday would be exactly as difficult as it needed to be.
Marcus, my baby, did not call at all. This hurt more than the other two combined, because Marcus is the one who used to sit on the counter while I made dinner and tell me every thought in his head.
The silence from Marcus told me something I had not wanted to know. He was the most ashamed. Which meant he had known this was wrong from the start. Which meant he had done it anyway.
On the Wednesday before dinner, I did something I had not planned.
I drove to the cemetery.
I do not go often. Bill is not there, in the way that matters. Bill is in the crabapple tree and in the coffee cup he used every morning that I still keep on the shelf and in the way I lock the back door before the front. But sometimes I go to the stone because it is a place where I am allowed to talk out loud.
I sat on the little folding chair I keep in my trunk for this purpose.
“Bill. Your children are trying to sell our house.”
The wind moved through the oaks.
“I know. I know what you’d say. You’d say I told you so, Marlene, which is why we did the trust. And I’d say yes, Bill, you did tell me so. But it’s a different thing to be told and a different thing to have it happen.”
I sat for a while.
“I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing on Saturday. Susan thinks I am. But Susan doesn’t have to be their mother on Sunday.”
The stone did not answer, which was appropriate.
I stood up eventually. Brushed off my coat. Folded the chair.
Before I got back in the car I said, out loud, to no one, “I’m going to tell them the truth, Bill. And then I’m going to see what they do with it.”
Saturday came.
I made the roast the way Bill’s mother taught me in 1974, with the onions cut thick and the carrots left almost whole. I made the green beans with the fried onions on top, which is not a dish that impresses anyone but which my children have eaten every Christmas of their lives. I made a pie.
Susan arrived at five thirty in a navy blazer, holding a bottle of Malbec and a manila envelope.
“You look like a lawyer,” I said.
“I am a lawyer.”
“You look like a lawyer who is about to enjoy herself.”
“Marlene, I bill by the hour. Every hour I spend at your dinner table is an hour I am not billing anyone. Please. Let me have this.”
At five minutes past six, headlights swept the driveway.
They arrived together. All three cars in a caravan, which meant they had met up somewhere first to coordinate. Rachel and Ted from the Naperville house. Danny and Karen straight from O’Hare. Marcus and Ashley from the city.
They came up the walk in a cluster, and I watched them through the kitchen window, and I felt something I had not expected to feel.
I felt sorry for them.
They did not know what they were walking into. They thought they were walking into a difficult conversation with an old woman who was going to cry and eventually agree.
They were walking into a dining room where the table was set for eight, and where their mother’s attorney was pouring wine, and where seven envelopes sat, unaddressed, on the sideboard.
Rachel came through the door first. She saw Susan. She stopped.
“Mom. Who is this.”
“You remember Susan Klein. Your father’s attorney. And mine.”
Susan smiled. “Rachel. It’s been a while. You’ve grown up.”
Rachel had not, in fact, grown up since Susan last saw her. Rachel was forty-six. Which was, I suddenly realized, the entire problem.
Danny came in behind her. He saw Susan and his face did a small, contained thing that I recognized from courtroom dramas on television.
Marcus came in last, holding Ashley’s hand, and when he saw Susan he stopped in the doorway and said, quietly, “Oh.”
Just that. Oh.
He knew.
Somehow, my youngest, my baby, understood in that single second what his siblings did not yet understand. That there was a lawyer at the dinner table. That his mother had prepared. That the entire premise of the last three weeks was about to come apart.
I gestured to the table.
“Sit down, everyone. Dinner’s getting cold.”
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