Marcus read the page a third time, and then he set it down on the piano and took off his glasses. He is a calm, careful man of thirty two, who sat in the second row of my choir and sang tenor for five years before he went to law school, and I have never seen him lose his composure. “Miss Tate, the notary stamp on this loan is real,” he said. “The commission number belongs to a man named Darius Banks. He is licensed in Jefferson County. He signed that he watched you put your name to this document, in his presence, on the fourteenth of March.” He looked up at me. “Is that your son in law?”
I nodded. My throat had closed. The page lay on the piano bench, in the warm yellow light of the lamp, beside the forty years of sheet music. A second mortgage, one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, on the house that I had paid for with the money of my husband, and my name, in a round and confident hand that was not mine, in the box marked Co Signer. “Miss Tate, this is bank fraud,” Marcus said, gently. “It is also a violation of notary law. He swore to a judge that he saw you sign. He did not. You were at a rehearsal at Greater Mount Zion that night. I can prove it.”
I thought of the morning of the party. I thought of Monique, in her blue dress, standing in the fellowship hall with her chin up and her voice shaking. Done with you. Forty choir members looking at their plates. And the van, which I had driven home that night, was sitting in my driveway now, gleaming under the porch light, with a child seat in the back that had the names of my grandsons stenciled on it in white. I laid my hand on the cool black wood of the piano and said, to nobody in particular, “Lord, give me the grace to do this right.”
A green folder kept inside a piano bench gave one mother the weekend to bring her daughter back to the choir in Birmingham.
I gave my terms to Marcus at the piano. We would go to the bank in the morning, and I would show them the forgery. The loan would be voided, and the house freed. The titles to the van and the truck would remain in my name, and Darius could take the bus. The notary board would be informed, and the district attorney. I would not press charges against my daughter, who had signed nothing, but I would ask for the truth, in her own voice. And in all of it, I wanted the boys of Monique protected, driven to school, fed, loved, and never told a bad word about their father.
On Sunday morning, Monique came to my door. She had not called. She stood on the porch of the brick house, in a rumpled sweater, with her hair in a scarf and her eyes sunk deep in shadow. In her hand was the key to the van, on a ring with a plastic star. “Mama, they towed the truck of Darius last night,” she said. “And a man from the bank called. He said something about the loan.” She looked at me, and I saw the little girl who had once hidden in my choir robe during a thunderstorm. “Mama, did you do that? Did you call them on us?”
“Monique, sit down,” I said. “I need you to hear this from me.” I poured her a cup of coffee and laid the page on the kitchen table. She read it, and I watched her lips go pale. “Darius signed my name and notarized it himself,” I said. “One hundred and sixty thousand dollars, against my house.” Monique pressed a hand over her mouth. Her whole body began to shake. “Mama, I did not know,” she said. “He told me you refinanced to help us. He said you were too proud to say so.” She bent over until her forehead touched the table. “Oh God. Oh God, Mama. I said such terrible things.”
I came around the table, and I knelt on the kitchen floor, which at seventy was a long way down. I took her face in my hands. “Monique, you were told a lie,” I said. “You believed it because you wanted him to be good. I understand that. I wanted your father to live.” She began to sob, openly, in great gulping breaths. “I will get up in a minute,” she said. “I just need to stay here.” I stayed. We were there for a long time, mother and daughter on the linoleum of the kitchen, and I sang to her, as I did when she was small, under my breath, a hymn I will not name.
Darius came to the house at noon. He pulled up in a rented sedan, and he stood on the porch with his hat in his hand and a lawyers smile. He did not get past the door. Marcus, who had come at ten with coffee and a folder, stepped into the hall, tall and quiet, and said, “Mr. Banks, I am an attorney for Mrs. Tate. I advise you to leave.” Behind him, two uniformed officers of the Birmingham police were coming up the walk. Darius turned and looked at them, and then at me, and for a moment his face went blank, like a screen. Then he sat down hard on the porch step.
The money consequences came in order. The bank voided the loan and apologized on stationery. The notary board revoked the commission of Darius, and the district attorney charged him with forgery and fraud, and he pleaded to a lesser count. The truck was repossessed, as it should have been. The house of Monique was sold, and she moved with the boys into the two bedroom apartment above my dry cleaning shop on Fourth Avenue, rent free for the first year. I kept the van. I drove her sons to school every morning at seven, and the youngest recited his spelling words from the back.
In the name of my husband, Calvin, who passed in 2018 and who built three buildings on one block out of starch and steam, I started the Fourth Avenue Fund. It pays for legal help, notary fraud recovery and counseling for older families in Jefferson and Shelby counties whose own children have used their names. In the first year, we helped thirty seven families. A retired choir director of eighty one, in a lavender suit, sat in the office with her hymnal on her lap. “They took my house,” she said. “I never thought my own boy would do it.” I took her hand.
