The word on the sticky note was GUARDIANSHIP. Rosalind Okafor had printed it in block capitals, and underneath she wrote, “Hearing Monday. Judge Castellanos.” I read it twice. My name is Florence Szabo, and I spent thirty-six years in a registrar’s office. I do not panic over paperwork. Then I did what a registrar does when a document frightens her. I asked to see the original. Rosalind slid the whole file across the desk, and I went through it page by page with my reading glasses on, the way I once checked forty thousand transcripts. “Rosalind,” I said, “this seal was pressed with a stamp from a craft store. The notary commission expired in March. And the signature of the doctor, a Dr. Whitcombe, is the same on every page. Real people do not sign identically.”
Rosalind put her glasses back on. “Mrs. Szabo, I have been in this business for twenty two years, and I have never been so glad to hand a file to a registrar.” She told me what she had learned from her friend in the office of the clerk. Gabor had petitioned to be my guardian, claiming I was forgetful and unsafe. Dr. Whitcombe, the affidavit said, had examined me in August. I have not seen a Dr. Whitcombe in my life. My own doctor at the hospital had written me up two weeks ago as sharp as a tack, and that record was sitting in her computer. “Do you want me to keep the file?” Rosalind asked. “Yes,” I said. “And make a copy.”
Through the window I saw Gabor end his call and look toward the building. Rosalind said, “Do you want me to bring him in?” I said, “Not yet.” I wanted to know who was on the telephone. We found out within the hour. A young woman at the front desk, who had seen everything, quietly told Rosalind that the man on the phone had called twice before, the previous Tuesday, from the lobby, and that his name was Wesley Marchand, the realtor from Saratoga. Rosalind opened my file. There was a sale listing paper clipped to the back. My own narrow blue house in Pine Hills, three blocks from the college, was already priced at four hundred ninety thousand dollars.
A retired registrar spotted a forged court order on a sticky note at an assisted living office and stood up for herself before a judge in Albany.
I walked out into the lobby with my purse on my arm and met my son at the door. He put on his gentle face. “Mom, I know this is a lot.” I said, “Gabor, I would like to go to lunch. On Wolf Road. As you promised.” He blinked. He had no plan for this, because in his plan I was a woman who cried. I took his arm like a lady. Rosalind watched us leave with her chin lifted, and I heard her tell the clipboard woman, in a voice I could have framed, “Mrs. Szabo is not a resident. Please void the deposit.”
At lunch he ordered the fish and told me how worried he was. I let him talk. Then I took the copied pages out of my purse and laid them beside his plate, one at a time, like a hand of bridge. The seal. The notary. The doctor I had never met. The listing for the house. Gabor stopped chewing. “Mom, I was going to tell you.” I said, “You were going to tell me after the movers came on Saturday.” His fork clattered. He looked at the people in the booth next to us, and for the first time that day, he did not have a story ready.
On Monday morning I did not wait at home. I put on the good blouse and the Budapest earrings, and I drove myself to the Albany County courthouse. My bridge club came too, five women between seventy and eighty eight, each carrying a casserole dish for no reason except to look formidable. Judge Nadine Castellanos looked at the petition, the seal, the doctor and the listing, then at me, and asked, “Mrs. Szabo, can you tell me today is Monday, who is the president, and what is the first thing you do with a form?” I said, “Read it, Your Honor. All of it.”
She dismissed the petition with prejudice before I sat down. Then she turned to my son, who was standing very straight beside a lawyer he had hired that morning. “Mr. Szabo, forging a court order is a serious felony in this state.” The district attorney was already on her feet. Gabor went white. I confess I felt something move in my chest, the way it does when a child runs across a street. I stood up and asked the judge whether I might speak. She said I might. I said, “Your Honor, I am his mother. Let me tell you what I want.”
What I wanted was this. No jail, not at his age, not for a first offense with his mother in the room. Instead he would repay the five thousand dollars, and the realtor would be reported to the state licensing board. The district attorney agreed to a plea if Gabor performed two hundred hours of service and went to counseling. Judge Castellanos looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. “You are more generous than he deserves,” she said. I answered, “I was a mother for fifty one years. It is a habit I cannot shake.”
In January, Rosalind Okafor became the fourth at my Wednesday bridge table, after one of our ladies moved to Florida. She turned out to be a ruthless player. On the second Saturday of the month, the doorbell rang, and there stood Gabor in an old coat holding a bag of onions and a package of paprika from the Hungarian market on Central Avenue. He had been giving his service hours at the food pantry. “Mom,” he said, “can you show me how Dad made it? I can chop.”
We stood in the narrow kitchen the whole afternoon. I taught him to cook the onions slowly until they melted, the way Laszlo taught me, and not a minute sooner. He chopped and sniffled and I let him say it was the onions. Outside, the first snow fell on the walk I would shovel myself in the morning, thank you. The pot began to smell like 1957, like a suitcase and a promise. Gabor took the wooden spoon from my hand and stirred, carefully, the way a boy stirs when he wants to be forgiven. I let him stir. Then I set two places at the table.
