The divorce papers slid across the glass of my notary window at the bank in Shreveport carried my name and my signature, and the woman who had signed them was holding my identification card. I am Brenda Fontaine, sixty four years old, a bank notary of twenty two years, and I was the one on the other side of the counter, which was a joke that fate had never found funny. I had pressed my seal on ten thousand documents. I would not press it on this one. The lawyer who had brought her had already stepped back from the window, with one hand resting on his briefcase.
She was perhaps forty five years old, with dyed auburn hair cut in the same blunt style as mine, and she wore a gray cardigan identical to the one hanging in my own office closet. Her name was Tiffany Marchand. The lawyer, a smooth man named Mr. Delacroix, had edged toward the side door the moment the manager picked up the telephone. The petition named my husband Gary as petitioner and me as respondent, and it signed over my half of our house on Ellerbe Road and my retirement account of three hundred thousand dollars.
I telephoned Gary on the cell phone he had carried for six years, and a woman answered, breathless and cheerful, saying that he was in the shower and could she take a message. I looked at the manager, a kind man named Mr. Boudreaux, who had gone gray at the temples. Then I heard, in the background, the tinkle of the little silver bell that I had given Gary for his fishing boat. The woman on the telephone was in my house, in my kitchen, at ten in the morning, on a Tuesday.
A divorce petition slid under a notary window gave one bank clerk the length of a lunch hour to bring her husband back to the truth in Shreveport.
I gave my terms standing in the conference room of the bank, with the officer at the door and the woman called Tiffany, my own double, weeping in a chair. “Mr. Boudreaux, please call my husband and ask him to come to the bank, now, with the woman who answered his telephone. Officer, I would like both of them to stay until I have heard the whole truth. And Gary, when you come, you will bring the key to the safe deposit box, because I think I know where my money has gone.”
Gary arrived at noon, with a woman named Candace in tow, and he looked ten years older than he had at breakfast. “Brenda, I lost it,” he said, standing on the bank carpet with his hat in his hands. “I put four hundred thousand dollars into an oil lease in East Texas that a man at the club recommended. It was a fraud. I was ashamed. I thought if I divorced you quickly and quietly, with you not knowing, I could keep what was left in my name. Tiffany is the sister of Candace. She looks like you. We practiced your signature for a month.”
But the lawyer was not finished, for Mr. Delacroix, who had lingered in the lobby, saw his chance. He saw the officer look away. In one motion he snatched the signed petition and the forged notary page from the conference table, the evidence of the whole scheme, and ran for the revolving door, meaning to reach his car at the curb and drive to the courthouse. A teller screamed. The guard sprang. And on the street outside, a delivery van swung to the curb and stopped short.
Mr. Delacroix stopped on the sidewalk with the papers crushed against his silk tie, the delivery van blocking the curb, the bank guard behind him and the young officer coming through the glass door with her hand on her belt. Mr. Boudreaux appeared in the doorway, very calm. “Counselor, I have recorded every second of this, and the lobby camera is better than the one at your own office. I would put those papers down on the pavement.” The lawyer looked at the bystanders, a dozen of them, their phones raised. He bent slowly, and he laid the papers on the sidewalk.
The consequences were swift and sensible. Mr. Delacroix lost his license to practice law in Louisiana and was charged with forgery and conspiracy, and Tiffany and Candace cooperated and received probation. Gary sold the boat and the truck and repaid what he could, and the oil lease men were pursued by the state attorney general. My lawyer filed a real petition for divorce, honest and slow, and when the judge asked me whether I wished to continue the marriage, I looked at Gary across the courtroom and said that I wished to be free of it.
In the name of my mother Odile, who passed in 2015, I started the Odile Fontaine Fund. It pays for legal help for spouses blindsided by false filings and for training for bank tellers and notaries in spotting stolen identities, in Caddo, Bossier and Webster parishes. In the first year we helped one hundred and eighteen spouses and trained three hundred and twelve tellers and notaries. One was a sixty seven year old retired schoolteacher from Minden who held her restored deed in both hands and told the volunteer she had thought the whole world was against her.
On a calm Friday in spring, I sat at the notary window of my bank in Shreveport, with my seal and my stamp pad and my reading glasses, as I had every working day for twenty two years. A young woman with a toddler on her hip slid her papers under the glass, and she showed me her identification card, and I looked very carefully at the face in the picture and at the face in front of me. “Thank you, honey,” I said, and I pressed my seal onto the page. It made a clean, bright sound.
