I called the paralegal back at six the next morning, before the first pot of coffee finished dripping. Her name was Renata Landry, and she was whispering in a parked car outside the house of her mother. “Miss Odessa, your son came to our office three weeks ago,” she said. “He had a newspaper clipping from the Advocate about the Atlanta company buying your stores. He told Mr. Pitre you were forgetting names, leaving the stove on, giving money to strangers. He said there was nearly seven million dollars, and that once a judge named him curator, he could pay Mr. Pitre a third as a fee.”
I closed my eyes. A third of my life, I thought, handed to a stranger for helping my son lock me in my own kitchen. “Honey, why are you telling me?” I asked. Renata took a breath. “My grandmother used to be a customer of yours on Plank Road. You pressed her church dress every Saturday and never charged her when she was short. I cannot sit at that desk and watch him do this.” She told me the hearing was set for Tuesday at nine in the Nineteenth Judicial District Court, and that Lionel had already signed an affidavit about my mind.
I did what I had done all my life when a stain looked permanent. I got to work. I called Mr. Guidry at home, and he came over in his bedroom slippers with his briefcase and a pound cake. I called Dr. Bellamy, my physician of twenty years, who agreed to see me that very Saturday and run every test the state of Louisiana allows. And I put on a pot of red beans, because a person thinks better with beans on the stove, and I pressed the last of the shirts of my son. All eleven. Every collar sharp as a fresh dollar.
A pressed blue shirt, a brave paralegal and a judge who once wore her collars turned a guardianship hearing into the best day of a Baton Rouge dry cleaner life.
On Tuesday morning I walked into the courthouse on Third Street in my Sunday suit with the rosary of Clifton in my pocket, Mr. Guidry on my arm, and the letter of Dr. Bellamy in my purse. I also carried a garment bag. Lionel and Shayla were already seated on the left, next to Mr. Pitre, a silver haired man with a pale tie. Lionel looked up and his face fell. I think he expected a woman in a bathrobe. Instead he saw his mother in pearls, with a straight back and a garment bag, and he looked at his shoes.
The judge was Honorable Marguerite Duplantis, a woman of about fifty with reading glasses on a chain. She looked at me over them. “Mrs. Thibodeaux,” she said slowly. “Plank Road. You pressed my robes in law school.” I told her I remembered the green one with the broken button. The courtroom shifted. Mr. Pitre rose to argue, and the judge held up one finger. “Counsel, I will read the physician report first.” Dr. Bellamy had written four pages. When the judge reached the last, she took off her glasses and said, “This is the sharpest mind I have seen in my courtroom this year.”
Mr. Pitre tried first to call Shayla to the stand. She said I had left a pot burning on the stove in August, and that I had called her Miss Lorraine twice at Easter. I answered from my chair that the pot held red beans and I had been at Mass, and that Miss Lorraine is the name of her mother and I had meant it as a compliment. A little laughter ran through the gallery. The judge did not smile, but the corner of her mouth moved. Then she asked Lionel to rise and tell the court, in his own words, what his mother had forgotten. He opened his mouth, and nothing at all came out.
Mr. Guidry then stood and handed up two things. The first was the sale contract with Atlanta, showing that every dollar was already placed in an irrevocable trust for my grandchildren, with a trustee at the bank on Government Street. The second was a printout Renata had sent, in her own brave hand, of the message Lionel left on the voicemail of Mr. Pitre. “After she signs the Medicare form, I will bring the folder. Seven million. We split it clean.” The judge played it aloud. Shayla gripped her purse. Lionel turned the color of unbleached muslin.
“Petition dismissed,” the judge said, “with prejudice. Mr. Pitre, I will be sending a letter to the disciplinary board.” She looked at Lionel. “Young man, there is a statute about fraud against an elderly parent, and I have not yet decided whether to forward it.” Then she looked at me, and her voice softened. “Mrs. Thibodeaux, would you like me to?” The room was silent. I looked at my son, fifty two years old, shaking in his church shoes. I said, “Your Honor, I would like a minute with my boy first.” She gave us the hallway.
We stood by the water fountain. I held out the garment bag. Lionel unzipped it, and inside were his eleven shirts, pressed, folded in tissue, the twenty dollar bill still pinned to the top one. “Mama, I am so ashamed,” he said, and his voice cracked like a boy of ten. “I owed money on the truck and the house. Shayla said you would never miss it.” I told him I missed him already, that I had for years. Then I told him what I wanted. Not his apology, but his hands. He would learn to press a collar, starting that Friday, at six in the morning.
For three months he did, at the Plank Road store, standing at the old steam machine in a rubber apron, burning his thumb twice and complaining all the while. By March he could finish a shirt in ninety seconds. Shayla came by with coffee and a quiet face. I never did forward anything to the district attorney. On the first Sunday of April, we all sat on my porch swing beside St. Joseph and the fig tree, eating crawfish, and my son leaned over and whispered, “Mama, put up the sign. Shirts pressed, free for family.” I laughed until I cried.
