PART 2
I need to tell you something about my grandmother, because my parents forgot it, and it cost them everything.
Grandma Eleanor was not a confused old woman.
Before she retired, she spent thirty-one years as the office manager for a law firm — the person who actually ran the place, who knew where every document lived and what every signature meant.
She had raised my father alone after my grandfather died. She had buried a husband, run a household, and managed a legal office simultaneously, and she did not miss things.
Which is why, when my father started telling her she was “getting forgetful,” she got suspicious instead of scared.
“A woman who ran a law office for thirty-one years knows what a durable power of attorney can do,” she told me, as we drove toward the courthouse. “I signed a temporary one after my knee surgery, for the six weeks I couldn’t drive. Temporary, Ivan. It expired two months ago.”
“So he’s been using an expired POA?”
“That’s what I need the courthouse to confirm.”
At the county courthouse, we pulled the records.
And Grandma — who apparently still knew exactly how to read a legal file — went very still.
The temporary POA she’d signed had indeed expired.
But three weeks after it expired, a new one had been filed.
A durable, permanent power of attorney, granting my father full authority over all her finances and — this was the part that made my blood run cold — decisions about her housing and medical care.
Her signature was on it.
“I never signed that,” Grandma said quietly.
She held the document up to the light, the way I’d later learn forensic people do.
“Look at the E in Eleanor. I’ve signed my name a quarter million times in my life. I don’t loop it like that. This is a forgery, Ivan. Your father forged my signature on a permanent power of attorney, and then he used it to empty my accounts and check me into a facility.”
She set the paper down.
“Now I understand the lunch.”
“The garden,” I said.
“The garden,” she agreed. “He needed me institutionalized and declared incompetent before I noticed the money was gone. A woman in a facility, labeled forgetful, isn’t a credible witness against her own son.
He wasn’t hiding me, Ivan.
He was disqualifying me.”
She pulled out her phone — a smartphone, which she used better than I did, another thing my father had conveniently forgotten — and she made a call.
“Margaret,” she said warmly. “It’s Eleanor. Yes, it’s been too long. Listen — I need my favorite attorney, and I need her today. It’s about Arthur.
Yes.
That kind of about Arthur.”
She hung up and looked at me.
“Thirty-one years at that firm,” she said, with the ghost of a smile. “You don’t think I made a few friends?”
