Part Six: Through the Door

Three weeks before Christmas, on a Tuesday afternoon, I was carrying a basket of clean towels up the stairs when I heard Vanessa’s voice through the half-open door of Richard’s old office. She’d been using it for her real estate work since she got her license two years earlier. She was on the phone.

“Once the old woman signs the papers,” she said, “we’ll finally be rid of her.”

I stopped on the landing.

Vanessa laughed. A light, easy laugh, the way you’d laugh about the weather.

“No,” she said. “She doesn’t suspect a thing. Brandon has her wrapped around his little finger. She’ll sign whatever he puts in front of her. She always does.”

There was a pause while she listened.

“Oh, the buyers are already lined up,” Vanessa said. “Four families. Deposits are in. Once it closes, she can go to Sunnyvale or wherever. They have a waiting list, but I know somebody.”

Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale Senior Care is a nursing home on the west side of Omaha. A good one, people say. But I didn’t need a nursing home. I drive. I garden. I volunteer at the library three mornings a week. I walk two miles around Memorial Park every day the weather allows.

I stood on the landing outside my late husband’s office with a basket of warm towels trembling in my arms. Then I turned around and went back down the stairs as quietly as I could, and I sat at the kitchen table for an hour without moving.

Part Seven: The Folder

That night, Brandon and Vanessa went to a holiday party at Vanessa’s real estate brokerage in the Old Market. They wouldn’t be home before midnight.

At nine o’clock, I went into Richard’s old office.

It didn’t look like his anymore. Vanessa had painted the walls gray and replaced his oak bookshelves with white ones from IKEA. But his desk was still there. The big walnut partner’s desk he bought at an estate auction in Council Bluffs in 1989 and refinished himself in the garage. It was too heavy to move, so Vanessa had kept it.

I sat down in the chair. I opened the bottom drawer.

Underneath a stack of invoices from Vanessa’s brokerage, I found a manila folder.

Inside were documents. A residential purchase agreement for my address, 5014 Underwood Avenue, with the seller’s name typed as Margaret A. Holloway. A listing agreement with Vanessa’s brokerage, with a signature on the seller’s line that looked like mine but wasn’t. A photocopy of my Nebraska driver’s license, front and back. And a page with QUITCLAIM DEED — PROPERTY TRANSFER printed in bold across the top, with my name as grantor and the space for my signature left blank.

There was a yellow sticky note on that page, in Vanessa’s looping handwriting. Mother’s signature required.

And at the very back of the folder, a single sheet of paper with a typed list.

CLIENT DEPOSITS — 5014 UNDERWOOD.

Four names. Four families. And beside each, a dollar amount and a date.

The Okafors — $25,000 — Oct 14.

The Lindqvists — $30,000 — Oct 29.

The Patels — $20,000 — Nov 8.

The Hendersons — $35,000 — Nov 20.

A hundred and ten thousand dollars. From four separate families. For one house. My house.

Which was not for sale.

I didn’t understand everything I was looking at. I’m a retired third-grade teacher, not a lawyer. But I understood enough.

My son and his wife weren’t just trying to make me uncomfortable in my own home. They were trying to take it. And somebody was taking money from four families for a house that couldn’t possibly be sold to all of them.

I took out my phone with shaking hands, and I photographed every single page.