The lawyer cleared his throat and read the second line of the letter of my mother aloud, and the room in Albuquerque went so quiet that I could hear the clock on his bookshelf. Did you ever wonder why Chula would never go near the husband of your sister? I am Lorraine Baca, sixty four years old, of Santa Fe, and I turned in my chair. Beside Yolanda sat her husband Rudy Medina, a smooth, heavy man in a tan sport coat, who had been very quiet since the reading began. Rudy looked at the carpet. Under the desk of the lawyer, the little white poodle that Javier had brought in his arms began to growl.
My mother Consuelo had written the letter in her last winter, in the careful blue ink of the Catholic school where she had learned her penmanship. She wrote that Chula, who was gentle with the mailman and the priest, had snarled every time Rudy sat down beside her at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She wrote that she had noticed, after those cups of tea, how foggy she grew, and how she woke with no memory of the afternoon. And she wrote that she had asked Javier to train Chula to warn her.
The training had worked. Javier read from a small notebook in his hand: the date, the time, the way Chula would take the cup from the table with her teeth and hide it under the sofa. Three times in one month. Mother had saved the cups in a shoebox in her closet, unwashed, and she had sent them to a laboratory in Denver, which had found a sedative in each. The lawyer opened a drawer and laid the lab report on the desk. Yolanda stared at it. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out.
A white poodle that refused to enter a room gave one retired principal the length of a will reading to bring her sister back to the truth in Albuquerque.
I gave my terms from my chair, in the voice I had used as an elementary school principal for thirty one years. “Yolanda, I am your sister, and I am sorry for what I am about to say. Rudy will go to the district attorney with the lawyer today. The will stands as our mother wrote it. Javier and Chula will have the house, the car, and the savings. And you and I will have a long talk, in private, about Christmas, and about every Sunday that I came alone.”
Rudy took off his tie, as if the room had gotten very hot. “Lorraine, I owed a hundred and eighty thousand dollars on a trucking company,” he said, in a thick, unsteady voice. “Consuelo had the house and the savings. I only meant to make her sleepy enough to sign a change to the will. A little at a time. I never wanted to hurt her. I do not know what I was thinking.” He stared at his big hands. “I should have asked for help. I was too proud. And the more I took, the more afraid I got.”
But Yolanda was not ready to hear it. She suddenly snatched the letter and the laboratory report off the desk, whirled around, and ran for the office door in her high heels, meaning to tear the pages to pieces in the elevator. She flung the door open, and the cold air of the hallway rushed in around her ankles. The secretary of the lawyer, a stout woman named Mrs. Archuleta, stood in the frame with her arms folded. Javier, who had been waiting in the hall, stepped in front of her with Chula in his arms. And the elevator doors slid shut behind them.
Yolanda stopped in the narrow hallway, in the cold fluorescent light, with the pages in her fist and the poodle looking up at her from the arms of the young man in the corduroy jacket. Chula did not growl. She wagged her tail once, twice, and licked the hand of Yolanda. My sister burst into tears. “Mama knew,” she sobbed, “and she still left me the love of the dog.” Javier held out his free hand, gently, and Yolanda placed the letter in it, and then she sank onto the bench and put her face in her hands.
The consequences were merciful and strict. Rudy pleaded guilty to elder abuse and fraud, and he received a sentence of seven years, because I asked the judge to consider the full truth. Yolanda sold her house and repaid the cost of the investigation, and entered counseling. The will of my mother was upheld in full. Javier was stunned, and Chula slept on his lap all through the reading of the papers. He told me he would sooner have Mama back than every penny, and I told him that was exactly why she left it to him.
In the name of my mother Consuelo, who passed in the winter at ninety, I started the Consuelo Baca Fund. It pays for trained service and alert dogs for seniors living alone and for adoption and veterinary care for shelter dogs placed with older owners, in Santa Fe, Bernalillo and Sandoval counties. In the first year we placed forty one trained dogs in homes and paid for four hundred veterinary visits. One was an eighty seven year old widower in Española who stood in his doorway, cradling a gray poodle puppy against his chest, and said she had the eyes of his late wife.
On a bright Sunday in May, I sat on a bench in the plaza of Santa Fe under a cottonwood, with a paper cone of roasted pistachios, and watched Javier teach a very small white poodle to sit. Chula, older and grayer, lay in the shade beside my feet. Yolanda came across the plaza in a yellow sundress, carrying three bags of pan dulce. She sat down beside me and handed me the first, and I broke it in half. Chula lifted her head and thumped her tail on the warm stone.
