“She signed it in a recovery room, Tyler,” I said, from my walker, in the doorway of the title office. “Or, rather, she did not. I was on a surgical table at the time, with a hip made of titanium.” The title officer, a lean woman in her sixties named Mrs. Erickson, held the power of attorney out at arm length like a dead fish. My grandson was on his feet. His new watch caught the light as his hand twitched. His wife Ashley had gone a color I can only describe as raw biscuit. Behind me, Mr. Gunderson, my lawyer, closed the door gently and stood with his back against it, which seemed to settle the question of exits.
“Grandma, this is a misunderstanding,” Tyler said. His voice was high. “You gave us verbal consent. You told us on the phone. We have been caring for the cabin. We have been paying the taxes!” I said, “Tyler, I pay the taxes. I have paid them every year since Walt died. Here are the canceled checks.” Mr. Gunderson passed them to the title officer. She leafed through them with a cold, interested eye. “Eleven years, one hundred percent on time,” she murmured. Ashley made a sound in her throat. Tyler said, “It is a technicality. It is my inheritance. It is practically already ours.” I said, “Honey, it is practically already not.”
I eased myself into the chair that Mr. Gunderson pulled out. My hip throbbed. It was only seven weeks since the surgery, and I was tired to the bone, but I would not have missed this for anything. “Mrs. Erickson,” I said, “I would like to tell you the whole story, if you do not mind.” She nodded. I took a breath. “In June, I broke my hip. The surgeon at St. Joseph operated on the twenty second. On that day, between eight in the morning and two in the afternoon, a power of attorney was notarized in Brainerd with my name on it. I have a hospital bracelet. I have an operative report. And I have a notary in Brainerd who is, I think, now very worried.”
A walker at a closing table and a hospital bracelet on a wrist ended a cabin sale and sent a grandson back to the dock.
I looked at my grandson. He was thirty one years old, tall and sandy haired, with the square jaw of Walt. I could not look at him without seeing the little boy who had stood on the end of our dock in a life jacket three sizes too big, grinning, with a perch dangling on a string. “Tyler,” I said, “I held you the day you were born. I fed you fish sticks on this dock. I taught you to bait a hook.” My voice broke. “Why would you do this?” He opened his mouth, and for a moment nothing came out. Then he sat down. He put his face in his hands. “Grandma,” he said, “we are drowning.”
It came out in a flood. A condo in Naples, put down with money they did not have. A car loan. A baby on the way, and the hours of Ashley cut at the clinic. They had been told by a so called financial adviser, a man at the golf course, that real estate was the safest road out. They had planned to sell the cabin and buy a place in Florida and live happily ever after. “We thought you did not use it anymore,” Ashley whispered. Her mascara had run. “We thought you were too old for the dock.” I said, “Ashley, dear, I sat on that dock last Saturday with a cane. I fed the loons.”
Mrs. Erickson set down the power of attorney. “Mrs. Larson,” she said, “I must tell you that what your grandson did is a felony. Forging a notary seal and a signature. I am required to report it.” The room was silent. The head of Tyler came up, white with terror. I said gently, “Mrs. Erickson, I understand. I would not ask you to break the law. But I would ask for forty eight hours before you report. I would like to speak with my family.” She considered me, over her glasses, for a long moment. “Forty eight hours,” she said. “And not a minute more.”
We went to the cabin. The four of us, Tyler and Ashley and Mr. Gunderson and I, drove up Gull Lake Road in two cars. The sun had begun to slant, laying long gold bars across the water. I sat on the porch swing, with the walker beside me, and I looked at the dock that Walt had built, silvered by sixty years of weather. Tyler stood at the foot of it with his hands in his pockets. Ashley sat on the step, rubbing her stomach. For a long time none of us spoke.
“Here is my offer,” I said. “I will not press charges. I will ask Mrs. Erickson to treat the paper as void, for lack of capacity. You will repay the forty eight thousand dollars you spent from the condo deposit, to the person who sold it to you, out of your own pockets, and you will not do it by borrowing against my cabin.” Tyler nodded, tears dripping. “And for the whole of this summer, you will come here on weekends and rebuild this dock, plank by plank. By hand. The way your grandfather did. When you are done, we will talk about the rest.” Ashley whispered, “Grandma, thank you.” I said, “Do not thank me. Hammer.”
They came every weekend. Tyler pulled up the rotted planks and carried them to the burn pile. Ashley, six months along, sat in a lawn chair with a thermos, handing him nails. They did not do it well. They did it with enormous earnestness, which is not the same thing, but sometimes comes close. I sat in the shade of the porch with my iced tea and told them where they were going wrong. By August, they had laid forty feet of new decking. Tyler stood at the end of it, dripping with sweat, and said, “Grandma, I think I understand why Grandpa did this.” I said, “Why?”
He said, “Because it is the only thing on the lake you can walk out on to see the whole sky.” I felt tears start. That fall, a baby girl was born, Lucille Anne, and on her first visit to the cabin, in October, I held her on the new dock in the sunlight, in a blanket the color of a robin egg. Tyler stood beside me with his arm around Ashley. I said, “This dock is for her.” He said, “Grandma, I am so sorry.” I said, “I know. Now cast.” He did. A bass hit the line.
