PART 3 — WHAT HE SAID, AND WHAT I FOUND
What Curtis said, standing in his own driveway with a county officer waiting, was this:
“It’s — the title’s in Simone’s name. The house is Simone’s.”
Nine words.
I watched them land on his mother from six feet away, and I am not going to pretend I felt nothing, because I felt a great deal, and about a third of it was pity.
Loretta said, “What?”
He said, “Ma.”
“What do you mean it’s hers?”
Bridget lowered the phone.
Officer Rennick, who I would like to formally thank in writing someday, was very calm about the whole thing.
He explained that the resident owner had every right to decline entry to a guest. He explained that Loretta had no tenancy, no residency, and no personal property inside the home, and therefore nothing to recover. He explained, in a voice you would use to describe a bus schedule, that calling emergency services to gain access to a residence you have no right to enter is not a great habit.
Then he asked me if I wanted the belongings removed from the property, and I said yes, and he stood by while Bridget put ninety minutes of loading back into the SUV in reverse, in front of the entire block, in about eleven minutes, saying nothing.
The peace lily went last.
Curtis carried two of the bins. His mother did not look at him while he did it.
They pulled out at 6:20. Officer Rennick left after them. The block party did not resume; people folded up their chairs and took their dishes and went inside over the next twenty minutes, and about six of them said something kind to me and none of them mentioned that they had watched the whole thing from a chair.
Curtis came back at nine. I let him in, because it was still his house to sleep in, and we sat in the kitchen, and I asked one question.
“Why didn’t you tell her? Ever? Eleven years?”
And he said, “Because it made her happy to think it.”
I have turned that sentence over more times than I can count. I think it is even true. I think it is also the smallest, laziest, most expensive sentence a grown man has ever said in my kitchen.
The next morning I did something I had not done in eleven years of marriage, which is that I sat down with the accounts.
Not out of suspicion. I want that on record. I did it because I had spent twenty minutes on my own porch unable to say a true sentence about my own life, and something in me wanted to see the whole board.
It took four hours.
There was an account at a credit union I did not use. Curtis had opened it in 2019. It was funded by an automatic monthly transfer out of our joint checking of nineteen hundred dollars, coded as CFerraro Sav.
Nineteen hundred a month. Since March of 2021.
Ninety-one thousand two hundred dollars, out of the joint account, to Fern Hollow Apartments.
He had been paying his mother’s rent for four and a half years and had never mentioned it once.
Her rent had not “gone up.” Her rent had gone up by a hundred and eighty dollars, and the reason she needed somewhere to live was that the money paying for it had gotten harder to hide as the joint balance got thinner, and I had started asking in July why we couldn’t seem to get ahead.
And then, in a folder in the filing cabinet in the room he wanted to give her, I found the other thing.
A home equity loan application. Sixty thousand dollars. Dated the previous March.
Denied. The letter from the lender was clipped to it, and the reason was one line: applicant is not a titleholder of record.
March.
In April he had started talking about how we should really get my name on that deed too, honey, for estate planning, so there’s no mess if something happens to you.
He raised it four separate times between April and August. I remember every one of them because each time I said I’d look into it and then didn’t, out of nothing but ordinary procrastination.
That is the only reason I still own my father’s house. I was too busy to get around to it.
