I opened the Bible on the windowsill, and a business card slid out onto my palm. It said, Harold Feldman, Attorney at Law, with a downtown Pittsburgh address and a telephone number in blue ink. I am Tamika Rowe, forty six years old, a home health aide, and I knelt in the shadows of the bedroom in Squirrel Hill with the recorder in my pocket and Mrs. Dunbar looking at me from the pillow. Downstairs, the front door closed, and the voice of Philip rolled up the stairs, easy and cheerful, introducing a man with a leather briefcase.
“Mother is resting,” Philip was saying. “She has had a little medicine. She will be a bit groggy, but she will sign what we put in front of her, just as she always does.” I heard two sets of footsteps on the stairs. I slid the card into my sleeve and straightened the quilt. Mrs. Dunbar, ninety years old and sharp as a tack, closed her eyes and let her jaw go slack. She played the part so well that I almost believed it myself. Then the bedroom door swung open.
The notary, a wide man in a gray raincoat with a stamp already in his hand and a smell of cigarettes on his coat, stopped when he saw me. The radiator knocked in the corner, and the lamp on the nightstand threw a small yellow circle across the quilt. “And you are?” Philip answered for me. “The aide. Tamika, wait downstairs.” I told him I would stay, as I was required to be present by the agency. He glared. Behind my back, I pulled out my telephone with the hand that held the card, and pressed the numbers one at a time, thumb moving blind. Mr. Feldman answered on the second ring. I did not speak. I simply laid the telephone face up on the dresser, with the line open.
A recorder taped under a nightstand gave one home health aide the afternoon to keep a ninety year old woman safe in Pittsburgh.
I gave my terms in a low, even voice, because I had been a hospital aide for fourteen years and I knew how to stand between a patient and a bully. “Mr. Philip, I will say this once. Your mother is awake, and she has heard everything. I have a recording from her nightstand, and I have a lawyer on the telephone right now. If you want to leave this house today without anything on your record, you will put the papers down, send this gentleman home, and sit in the kitchen until Attorney Feldman arrives with a doctor.”
Mrs. Dunbar opened her eyes, clear and bright as winter. She pushed herself up on her pillows. “Philip,” she said, in a voice that carried across the room, “what is the date? Who is the mayor? What did I have for breakfast?” She answered every question before he could reply. “Oatmeal, with raisins, and the girl cut the toast in triangles, which I have not seen since my husband was alive.” She turned her head. “You may take that stamp, young man, and go home.” The notary was already backing toward the door.
The face of Philip twisted. He lunged across the room, past the bed of his mother, and ripped the little digital recorder from the pocket of my uniform with both hands. Then he fled, thundering down the stairs, a gold cufflink flashing, and made for the front door. At the foot of the staircase, in the narrow hall, stood Miss Odessa, the other aide of the agency, who had been sent to relieve me for the evening. She was sixty one years old, built like a mailbox, and she carried a big wicker laundry basket piled high with sheets.
Philip ran into the basket at full speed. Sheets exploded in every direction, white and floating, and he went down in the middle of them like a man falling into a cloud. The recorder skittered across the hardwood and stopped at the foot of Miss Odessa, who set one sensible shoe on top of it. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, with great dignity, “I was bringing these to the wash.” Mr. Feldman, who had that moment come up the front steps with a doctor and a briefcase, stepped over the pile of linen and picked up the recorder.
The money consequences were set in order by Attorney Feldman, who delayed his retirement by two weeks for the purpose. The doctor, an eminent neurologist, signed a statement that Mrs. Dunbar was of fully sound mind. Every document that Philip had arranged was voided. The will of two million, six hundred thousand dollars, the one she had signed in 2019, stood. Philip, facing charges, agreed to repay what he had taken and enter a program for his gambling. Mrs. Dunbar chose not to press the case.
In the name of her husband Samuel, Mrs. Dunbar started the Samuel Dunbar Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for independent legal advocates for older adults, training for home aides and fraud alerts for families, in Allegheny, Beaver and Washington counties. In the first year we trained one hundred and eighty aides to recognize the signs of pressured signatures and answered more than four hundred calls from families. One caller was a granddaughter from Mt. Lebanon who found a notary stamp in the pocket of her uncle.
On a Sunday in the spring, with the lilacs coming out along the fence, I carried a tray of tea into the sunroom and set it beside the chair of Mrs. Dunbar, who had been reading the Post Gazette with a magnifying glass. Miss Odessa folded towels at the table. A new aide, hired by the fund, was practicing blood pressure readings on Mr. Feldman, who bore it with a smile. Mrs. Dunbar lowered the paper and looked me over. “Tamika,” she said, “you have the best hands in Pittsburgh.” I poured her tea, and the steam rose. Out in the garden a robin worked the lawn, and inside the house, for the first time since I had come, nobody was afraid of the doorbell.
