Part 3 — The Backup Offer
Courtney lunged across the table, but Ryan was faster. He caught her wrist, not to protect her, I think, but because he already knew what the voice on my phone was about to say. I pulled the phone back and let the message finish, and every person around that table heard the name of Courtney in the mouth of a stranger.
“Mrs. Pruitt,” the old man said, “the name my agent gave me was Courtney Pruitt, of CK Homes, a company formed in March. The offer is two hundred and twelve thousand dollars, cash, to close in ten days. Your house is listed at three hundred and eighty-nine. I did not like the sound of it. I am seventy-nine, and I have been a widower for six years, and I know what a house means to a woman who planted forty-one rosebushes with her husband.” Then the message ended.
Nobody said anything. Courtney sat down with her face in her hands. Ryan stared at his wife the way you stare at a stranger who has been living in your house. Across the table the sister of Courtney whispered, “Tell me you did not.” Courtney did not tell her.
I had spent that week with a notebook, a pot of coffee, and a lawyer from my church named Mrs. Oyelaran, who has practiced for thirty years and does not hurry for anyone. She explained it to me plainly, and I will explain it plainly now. A power of attorney is a duty, not a prize. An agent who uses it to sell the house of his mother to his own wife for little more than half its worth is acting against the person he was trusted to protect, and the law calls that self-dealing. It can be undone.
She had also pulled the records of the state. CK Homes had been filed in March by Courtney, three weeks before Easter. Ryan had signed the listing, the disclosure, and the reply to the offer as my attorney in fact, and the only buyer who stood to profit from the whole arrangement was his wife.
On Thursday, before any of this came out, I had signed a revocation of the power of attorney in the office of Mrs. Oyelaran with two witnesses, and she had sent the notice by certified mail to Ryan, to the title company, and to the listing agent. By the time my son lifted his mimosa at the brunch, he was no longer my agent. He had been removed in writing, with a stamp.
Ryan asked, in a voice I did not recognize, whether I was going to have them arrested. I looked at my son, the boy who used to hold the other end of the hose for his father, and I said what I had decided in the dark the night before. No. But the listing was canceled, the contract with CK Homes was void, and a letter would go to his agent explaining that what he said about my mind was false. The doctor who replaced my hip had written a note after a full evaluation. It said what I already knew: I was sound.
Courtney tried one last time. She said she had only wanted what was best, that the house was too much for me, that the basement was warm and lovely. I said I was grateful for the invitation and that I would decline it. I told her a basement with a little window is a fine place for a washing machine, and a poor place for a woman who has her own porch.
Then there was the matter of the buyer. When I called Mr. Abbott back, we talked for an hour about his late wife, about her tomatoes, and about whether the Peace roses would take to the shade of his porch in Cheney. He had pulled out of the sale the day before the brunch. He asked if he might drive over on Saturday and see the garden, not to buy it, only to look. I said I would put the coffee on.
A house is not sold when the paper is signed, but when the one who loves it has finally agreed to let it go.
Ryan sat at the table a long while after the brunch ended, with the cake in front of him and the pink letters gone soft. At the end he asked whether he could come to the house on Sunday and prune with me. I said he could carry the clippings. A man who forgets the roses of his father can learn them again, one at a time.
On Saturday Mr. Abbott came up the walk with a straw hat in his hand and stood at the back fence for a long time. I showed him the one that smells sweetest, the red one near the gate that Hal planted on our twentieth anniversary, and he bent down and breathed it in with his eyes closed. “Forty-one,” he said. “In order.” I said yes, and I handed him the shears.
