Part 3 — Granite Beside Harlan
Rochelle took a breath and said it plainly. “Harold Dean Voss.” The room did not understand at first. Then Crystal sat down on a stool at my kitchen counter as though someone had cut a string, because Harold Dean Voss was her father.
It all came out right there between the cabinets I had been so fond of. Harold had passed in his sleep in April, of his heart, in the very same week I had my surgery. Wade and Crystal did not have the money for a burial plot, and Wade had a poker debt to settle besides. So he forged my name on a deed, had it notarized while I lay under anesthesia, took the plot beside Harlan into his own name, and passed it in June to Palm Shade Funeral Home for $1,800 in cash.
Palm Shade set a granite marker on the plot for the family who had arranged things through them. That was the headstone Rochelle saw. There was no burial there. The ashes of Harold were still in the chapel at the funeral home, waiting politely for a place that was not mine. I want that understood. No one had been laid to rest beside my husband, and no one ever would be.
Crystal began to cry, the real kind, with her hands in her lap. I told her I was sorry for the loss of her father, and I meant it. A man deserves a resting place. He just did not deserve one built on a lie, and neither did she deserve to learn it in my kitchen with a realtor watching.
Rochelle explained the law in a clear, patient voice. A deed signed by a person who did not sign it is void from the start, and everything sold on top of it is void too. Palm Shade had bought from someone who owned nothing, so the plot came straight back to me. No stamp, however official, can transfer a thing that was never the signer to give. The title insurance of the funeral home would pay to lift the marker and to place Harold in a niche chosen by his family, at the expense of Palm Shade.
Wade finally looked at his ex-wife. “Why are you even here?” he asked. She did not raise her voice. “I moved to Ocala two years ago, Wade. I work at Marion Title. I read the county recording list every morning with my coffee, and the name of your mother came across my screen.” That was why he had told me she was in Jacksonville. She was the one person who could spot his work from across a room, because she had watched him practice signatures at the kitchen table for eight years.
Wade pleaded guilty in the fall to forging a deed and defrauding an elderly person. The judge gave him three years of probation and ordered him to repay every dollar he took from my account, with the debt to the poker players left for him to settle alone. The mobile notary who stamped that page while I lay on the operating table lost his commission before Labor Day.
Crystal came to my front door the next Saturday with no makeup and her hair in a rubber band. She said she was sorry in a voice I had not heard from her before. I told her I would pray for her father. I told her I would also be keeping my plot, thank you, and that I hoped her family found peace somewhere else.
The young couple who had loved my kitchen sent me a card. They found a house on Southeast 12th Street, and the wife is expecting in January. I like to think they made the cabinets theirs in their own way.
The man who bought my salon chair from my driveway drove up to my house one Tuesday in a pickup with the chair strapped in the bed. He would not take back his twenty dollars. He said no woman who had stood behind a chair for thirty-six years should have to sit anywhere else. The woman who paid fifteen dollars for the Singer of my mother came the following week with the machine wrapped in a quilt.
I am walking without the cane now. The hip is slow, but it is mine, and so are the six porch steps that Crystal said I would never climb again. I climbed them one at a time last Sunday with Dot holding my elbow and Rochelle holding the door.
Harold is at peace now in a quiet niche under a live oak, and Harlan is where he has always been, with an empty plot beside him that is waiting for me and not for anyone else. In the evenings I sit on the lanai under the orange tree, and a neighbor girl comes over with a magazine, and I do her hair in the old chair. It is the best Saturday there is.
