The printout in the lobby was a petition. Brianna slid it across the front desk, and I put on my reading glasses. It asked a probate court in Mobile County to name my son as my guardian because I was “confused, wandering and unsafe at home.” It listed my house on Crestwood as an asset to be sold “to fund her care.” There was a price already penciled in, and a doctor signature I had never seen, dated in August. The transport on Sunday was for a short stay at the county facility, “for evaluation.” Once I was in, the paper said, a hearing could follow without me.
“Did you read it twice?” Brianna asked, and I nearly laughed. “Honey,” I said, “I read it three times.” My husband Floyd had given me one rule, and I had kept it for thirty years. I folded the pages into my purse and thanked her. “Do you have a phone in the back I can use, one that is not the room line?” She led me to the manager office and pulled out a chair. Then I did what I did best for thirty one years at the steel company. I started connecting calls, one at a time, to everyone who mattered.
First, Juanita at church, who answered on the second ring and said a word she had to repent of later. Then Pastor Vance, who knew a lawyer. Then the lawyer, Mr. Tuggle, an old friend of Floyd from the welding hall, who listened without a sound and said, “Billie, do not move. I am driving down.” Then Adult Protective Services, where a calm woman took every detail and gave me a case number. By lunchtime, the manager of the hotel had brought me a plate of shrimp and promised that no van would come near me. I ate every bite, because I was angry, and I was hungry.
A hotel clerk with a printout and a switchboard operator with a phone gathered a church, a lawyer and a deputy to stop a stolen guardianship in Gulf Shores.
Roderick and Desiree arrived at ten forty five on Sunday morning, sunglasses on, smiling in the way people smile when they have rehearsed. Desiree carried a small suitcase, my own, which she had packed for me at the house. They walked through the lobby doors and stopped. In the lounge by the window sat Juanita, Pastor Vance, Mr. Tuggle with a briefcase, a social worker from the state, and two deputies from the sheriff office. I sat in the middle with my feet crossed and a glass of sweet tea. “Good morning, son,” I said. “Are you early or am I late?”
“Mama, what is all this?” Roderick said. “You must be very confused.” The word hung in the cool lobby air. I took the petition from my purse and set it on the table. “I am not confused, Roderick,” I said. “I know my name and my age. I know my address and the price you wrote beside it. I know a van was ordered for eleven, and I know who paid for it.” Mr. Tuggle cleared his throat. “Mr. Gaddy, this document carries your wife signature, but not her handwriting.” Desiree put a hand to her mouth.
“It was supposed to be temporary,” Desiree whispered. “The house was falling apart on us. We had debts. Roderick said once the sale went through, we would move you somewhere nice.” “Somewhere nice,” I repeated, “in Mobile, with a locked door?” Roderick stared at the carpet. “Mama, I did not see another way.” “You could have asked me,” I said. “A mother can say yes, if she is asked.” That was the moment the room changed. He was not a villain just then. He was a frightened man who had taken a wrong turn and kept driving.
The state did what states do, slowly and with paperwork. The petition was withdrawn, and Mr. Tuggle filed papers to protect my house and my savings in a trust that no one could touch but me. Roderick and Desiree faced charges for the forged signature, and they agreed to repay what they had spent. A judge allowed Roderick a lesser sentence, with community service at a senior center, where he now serves lunch on Tuesdays. He cannot meet my eye yet. He brings me extra cornbread anyway, and I take it, and we both say nothing.
In the weeks that followed I learned how close it had come. The facility in Mobile would have admitted me on a signature that was not mine, and the hearing might have gone ahead before I could say a word. The social worker told me gently that she saw cases like mine every month, and that few ended with the senior sitting in a hotel lounge with a glass of sweet tea. “Most of them never find their desk clerk,” she said. I wrote Brianna a letter on my best stationery, and a check for her college books, and I signed it with my full name.
The welded railings still stand all over Five Points South, and one Sunday afternoon Juanita and I walked down to see them. I ran my hand along the cool black iron and told him out loud that I had read it twice. A couple walking their beagle smiled at me, and I smiled back. At eighty years old, I had been very nearly packed up and sent away by my own son. Instead I stood in the sun, on my own two feet, with my house waiting for me up the hill and my friend on my arm.
The next Saturday Juanita and I took a bus back down to Gulf Shores, on my own money, with the manager of the hotel waving us off at the curb. We rented the little pink cottage on the beach road, still standing, still pink, with the same crooked screen door. I sat under a striped umbrella with a paperback and let the sun find my knees, just like old times. When the tide came in, I laughed out loud, and Juanita said I sounded eighty years old, and I said that I had earned every minute of it.
