Diane stood in the doorway to the hall.
She’s seventy-eight and my height, five-foot-two, with short gray hair cut in a bob and a face I’d have known anywhere. We’d sat beside each other at church every Sunday for fifteen years. She brought me chicken soup the week Harold died. She wore a navy cardigan and a string of pearls, and she held a cup of tea in both hands.
She looked at me, and I looked at her. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
“I suppose,” Diane said quietly, “you’d like an explanation.”
“I’ve had one. From Karen.”
“Not mine.”
“No.”
She set down the cup. Her hands trembled, thin and spotted, with swollen knuckles.
“I’d like to say it was Brian’s idea,” she said. “It wasn’t. Not entirely.”
Karen made a small sound. “Diane. Don’t.”
“I’m seventy-eight years old, Karen. I’d like to say it once.”
She stood in that gleaming kitchen in her navy cardigan and told it.
“My husband, Frank, died in 2011,” Diane said. “I never told you how. He’d gambled. Not in a casino. In the stock market, on margin, with money we didn’t have. He lost everything. Then he took his own life.” Her voice was flat and level. “I found him in the garage.”
I put a hand to my chest.
“I was left with a second mortgage on a house I couldn’t afford, two grown sons, and a pension of nine hundred dollars a month. Brian was the one who held me up. He was my boy. He sent me a check every month for two hundred dollars. For years.”
Her eyes were bright and hard.
“Then his gym failed. He came to me in April and said, ‘Mama, I’m going to lose the house.’ I said, ‘What can I do?’ And he said, ‘There’s Eleanor.’”
I stood very still.
“I said no. I said, ‘No, Brian. She’s my friend.’ And he said, ‘Mama, she’s got eighty thousand dollars sitting in a savings account doing nothing. She’s eighty years old. She’ll be gone in five years. It’s all going to Karen anyway.’”
“That’s a monstrous thing to say,” Philip Reyes said mildly.
“It is,” Diane said. “I know.”
“Did you object?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And he said, ‘Mama, I’m your son. You’d let me lose everything?’” Her voice broke.
I looked at her: a tiny, upright, shaking old woman in a kitchen she never earned.
“And you said yes,” I said.
“I said yes,” said Diane Whitaker.
Nobody moved. Officer Alvarez had stopped writing. Philip was looking at the floor. Karen stood against the counter with her arms wrapped around herself, crying without a sound.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Diane said. “I wouldn’t. I put on your coat, Eleanor. I walked into that bank three times in your coat. I looked that sweet girl in the eye and said, ‘Lovely, dear.’” Her face twisted. “I’ve been sick for six days. I haven’t eaten.”
“I can see that.”
“I knew it was wrong the minute I walked in the first time. I wanted to turn around. But I’d already told Brian I’d do it.”
“You could have said no.”
“Yes.”
“You could have told me.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She looked at me.
“Because I thought if I told you, you’d stop being my friend,” she said. “And I thought I’d rather be your thief than be alone.”
I’ll tell you what I did next, because it’s the part I’ve never been able to explain.
I crossed the kitchen, past the island and the six-burner range and the shining copper pots, and stopped in front of her. She flinched. I took her hands.
They were thin and cold and shaking, and I held them in mine. For a long moment we stood there, two old women in matching cardigans, with a lifetime of Sunday mornings between us.
“Diane,” I said. “I’m so angry.”
“I know.”
“I’m angrier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
“I know.”
“I’d like to say terrible things to you.”
“Say them.”
“I’m not going to.”
She looked at me.
“Because I think you’ve already said them to yourself,” I said. “For six days. And I don’t think I could improve on them.”
Her face crumpled. She bent over slowly, like a tree going down, rested her forehead against our joined hands, and wept.
I stood there holding her in my daughter’s kitchen, under a pot rack I’d paid for, and looked over her gray head at Karen.
My daughter was staring at us with her mouth open. She looked like someone watching the sky rearrange itself.
It took four days to untangle the worst of it.
Philip Reyes drew up a plain two-page agreement that afternoon on a yellow legal pad at Karen’s kitchen island, in his slanting, old-fashioned handwriting. It said that Karen Whitaker and Brian Whitaker acknowledged receiving $61,000 from the account of Eleanor Lane through misrepresentation and forgery. It said they would repay it in full, with interest at four percent, over ten years, at $618 a month. And it said I could have a lien recorded against their house in Centerville for whatever was still unpaid.
The house had a first mortgage of $198,000 and, after Brian paid the arrears with my money, a second mortgage of about $186,000 left on the gym loan. Philip shook his head when Karen told him.
“Your lien would be third in line, Eleanor,” he said. “Behind both banks. If they ever sell, the banks get paid first. But it still means they can’t sell or refinance without dealing with you.”
“And if they stop paying?”
“Then we go to court, and you could ask a judge to order the house sold.”
I looked at my daughter at the table with her face in her hands.
“I won’t do that.”
“You don’t have to,” Philip said. “But the right will be there.”
“I’d like it noted,” I said, “that it’s there to protect her. Not me.”
He gave a faint smile. “I’ll add a clause.”
The next week, Karen and Brian signed a formal promissory note and a mortgage in my favor at Philip’s office downtown, in front of a notary. Brian came in a borrowed sport coat and wouldn’t look at me. Philip recorded the mortgage with the Montgomery County Recorder’s Office the same afternoon. The filing fee was $34.
Brian deposited the $11,400 from the kitchen island directly into my new account at First Miami Valley. Mr. Okafor counted it himself.
