The father of Philip is a lean, silver haired man named Gordon Whitcomb who made his money in commercial real estate, and he turned the cream envelope over twice before he slit the flap with his thumb. A gold logo shone on the back, a sun over a mountain, and I saw him recognize it. “Desert Sun Hospitality,” he read aloud. “Wilma, that is the hotel group that bought half of western Colorado last fall.” I nodded. “They bought seven motels along Interstate 70. From Grand Junction to Green River. The Desert Rose, the Sage Motor Lodge, the five others. Nine million four hundred thousand dollars.” I turned the little pink rose pin on my blouse. “That is the contract in your hand.”
Nobody said a thing. The sun was going down behind the Monument, and the great glass wall of the dining room had turned the color of flame, so that every face at the table looked lit from within. The champagne glass of Sandra hung in midair, forgotten. Her husband Philip, a polished man of fifty five with a very expensive haircut, was staring at the contract with what I can only describe as the face of a man who has just seen the last piece of a puzzle drop into place. “Sandra,” he said slowly, “you told me your mother was a retired motel clerk. You said she had a small pension.”
Sandra put the glass down. She is fifty two, a handsome, tense woman with a blond bob, and she said, “Philip, I can explain.” “Mother,” she said, turning to me, “you never told me you sold them.” I said, “You never asked me about the motels, Sandra. Not once in thirty years. You asked about my estate.” Her mother in law drew a sharp breath. “You brought a stack of papers to my kitchen table on Christmas Eve, and you flagged the signature pages with little yellow arrows, and I trusted my own child.”
A cream envelope carrying a gold hotel logo was turned over in a glass walled dining room and gave one motel owner the evening to bring her daughter back to the front desk.
“It was a refinance,” Sandra said, too fast. “The papers said refinance.” I said, “Page fourteen said co borrower. It said four hundred ninety thousand dollars. It said Foothills Drive.” I opened the mortgage on the table and put my finger on the little flag. “Your name is on the line above. Mine is on the line below, in a handwriting that I do recognize, because it is mine. But I signed under the belief that it was a trust document for my own estate, to protect you from probate.” My voice caught. “You used my own loneliness against me, Sandra. I wanted so much to be needed.”
Philip rose to his feet. He walked to the great window and stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the red stone of the Monument going to purple. When at last he turned, I saw a different man. “Wilma,” he said, “I owe you an apology. I believed my wife when she said you had approved this. I believed her because I wanted to.” He passed a hand over his face. “I wanted the house. I wanted my parents to see it. I never once asked what I should have asked, which was whether your signature was freely given.” He looked at his wife. “I am going to ask now. Sandra. Was it?”
Sandra opened her mouth, and for a moment I saw her about to say yes. I saw the whole lie assemble itself behind her eyes, quick and automatic, as it must have done a hundred times. Then she looked at me. I do not know what she saw. An old woman in a cardigan with a pink neon pin. The mother who had cleaned thirty rooms a day so that a girl could go to college. Something broke in her face. “No,” she whispered. “It was not freely given. I put the pages in the stack and I let her sign.” She began to cry, a dry, ugly sound. “Mother, I was so afraid.”
I got up and went around the table. My hip hurt, and the carpet in the new house was very thick. I put my arms around my daughter from behind, bent over her shoulders, and rested my cheek against her hair. It smelled of salon shampoo and expensive vanilla. “Sandra,” I said, “you cannot be afraid of me. You are my child.” She turned in the chair and buried her face against my stomach, and I held her head with both hands, and the whole room looked away, out of the kind of mercy that costs nothing. “I will not hold the loan,” I said. “But the house is going.”
They did what had to be done. The house on Foothills Drive went on the market in May and sold in a week, to a doctor from Aspen, for a few thousand over the mortgage. Philip and Sandra moved into a rented three bedroom near the Mesa Mall. Philip, I understand, took a job at a smaller firm, and Sandra took one as a receptionist at a dental office on North Avenue. The first time she called me from her desk, she sounded breathless and strange, and she said, “Mother, I have been answering a phone for four hours. It is so hard.”
I laughed until I cried. Then I said, “Sandra, come to the Desert Rose on Saturday.” The new owners had kept the building as a heritage property, and the pink sign still glowed against the evening sky. I put her in a pair of rubber gloves and handed her a bucket and a bottle of cleaner, and we stripped Room Six together, as I had done for ten years with Floyd, before the second shift, before the manager, before the money. She scrubbed the tub. She made the bed with hospital corners. When she straightened, red faced and soaked, she looked at me with wonder. “It is honest,” she said. “It is the only honest thing I have done in years.”
That summer I sat with her on the edge of the kidney shaped pool at the Desert Rose, in lawn chairs, with a pitcher of lemonade sweating between us, and we watched the sun fall behind the cottonwoods along the river. Sandra put her bare feet in the water. After a long while she said, “Mother, will you tell me about Daddy and the first year?” I leaned back in the chair. “It was 1972,” I began. “We had eleven dollars and a coffee pot.” She listened till the stars came out, and the pool light turned the water green.
