Chapter 6: What My Mother Hid in the Attic
Teddy had called at ten past eight that morning with her mouth full.
“He signed it. Alder. Seven forty, in his chambers, probably in his bathrobe, I didn’t ask. You’ve got two hours in the house today with Sam and a locksmith, personal property only, and you don’t take anything that looks like it belongs to a company, and if there’s any question you leave it and photograph it. Eat something. I’m on my way to the State’s Attorney.”
“Did they—”
“They took it. An assistant named Natarajan, who has a face like a closed door and read the whole file in front of me without skipping, which nobody does. She’s subpoenaed the notary’s journal.” A pause for chewing. “Dana Keel had a lawyer by nine fifteen. Nine fifteen, Lena. That’s not a woman who’s surprised.”
So I’d eaten a piece of toast I didn’t want, under the lemon curtains, with Mrs. Pruitt watching me do it. And at ten o’clock Deputy Okoro’s small clean car had pulled up outside, and I’d walked two doors down Juniper Lane on my own feet for the first time since I was twenty-eight.
The locksmith was a boy of about twenty with a sunburn and a court order taped to his toolbox, and he opened my mother’s front door in forty seconds.
I’d expected it to take longer. I’d stood on the rotten porch with my hand on the rail and watched him kneel at the lock Grant had paid someone to put there in April, a brass one, new, too good for the door, and I’d thought, this will take a while, I have a while to get ready. Then it clicked, and he stood up, and the door swung in on the hallway where I’d dropped my schoolbag every afternoon for twelve years, and I wasn’t ready at all.
“Two hours,” Deputy Okoro said behind me. “I’ll be on the porch.”
“You can come in.”
“I know I can. I’d rather you had the house to yourself for a minute.” He looked at the sign on the lawn, the painted building with its balconies, and then back at me. “Go on, ma’am.”
I went in.
It smelled like her. That’s the thing I hadn’t thought about. Two years and four months, with the windows shut and the power off and strangers coming through with boxes, and the hall still smelled like my mother: lemon oil and the cedar blocks she kept in every closet and, under that, faintly, the particular dust of a house where a person had cooked the same six things for thirty years.
I stood in the hall and breathed it until I could stand to do anything else.
Then I went through the rooms.
They’d cleared it. Teddy had warned me and I’d nodded and I hadn’t understood. Mrs. Pruitt had seen the truck in May, two men and a van with no name on it, and they’d been in and out in a day. The front room was empty except for the lemon curtains, which they’d left because, I suppose, curtains come with a house. The kitchen table was there, because it was bolted to the wall, because my grandfather had built it that way in 1961 for reasons nobody had ever explained. The chairs were gone. The china cabinet was gone. My mother’s bedroom had a rectangle of clean floor where the bed had been and a nail in the wall where a picture of my grandparents had hung for as long as I’d been alive.
“Storage unit,” Teddy had said, the night before, at Mrs. Pruitt’s table with the photograph between us. “On the east side. In the company’s name. I’ll get an order for that too, but not by Tuesday.”
“Everything?”
“Everything they thought was worth boxing. Which, from the inventory Parrish coughed up, was clothes, furniture, dishes, books, and one filing cabinet.” She’d tapped the photograph. The green book against my mother’s chest. “I’ll bet you a month of my salary the filing cabinet was the first thing on the truck.”
I stood in my mother’s empty bedroom and thought about a filing cabinet. It had been grey. It had been in the corner by the window, with a fern on top of it that she’d kept alive for twenty years by talking to it, and it had held her taxes and her warranties and the folder of my school reports, and I had opened every drawer of it a hundred times as a child looking for scissors.
She had never once kept anything that mattered in it.
I knew that. I’d known it since I was seven.
My own room was at the back. They’d cleared that too, down to the carpet, which had a darker square in it where my bed had stood for eighteen years and a pale scar by the window where I’d spilled nail polish remover at fifteen and tried to hide it with a rug. The closet door was open. There was one wire hanger on the rail, turning a little in the air from the hall, and nothing else, and I stood in the doorway and understood for the first time that there was no version of this where I got any of it back. Not the bed. Not the fern. Not the picture of my grandparents. It was in boxes in a unit on the east side with a company’s name on the lease, and by the time any judge got around to it there’d be a building here with balconies.
I didn’t cry. I noted that. I’d stopped crying sometime around Tuesday and hadn’t started again, and I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t have time to find out.
* * *
The attic ladder was in the hall closet ceiling, behind a panel you had to push up and slide.
The men with the van hadn’t found it. Or they’d found it and looked up into the dark and the insulation and the heat and decided the inventory said filing cabinet, not attic. The panel was still painted shut at one corner, the way it had been since I was small, and I had to get the locksmith’s screwdriver from the porch and work it loose, and Deputy Okoro watched me do that from the doorway with an expression that said he was deciding whether a woman seven months pregnant was going to climb a ladder in front of him.
“I’ll go up,” he said.
“You won’t know where to look.”
“Then you’ll tell me where to look, ma’am, from the bottom of the ladder, with both feet on the floor.”
I told him.
Up the ladder. Turn left. Past the Christmas boxes, if they’re still there, which they won’t be. All the way to the chimney, where the brick came up through the floor. The board on the far side of the chimney, the short one, the one that didn’t match. It lifts if you press the near end. There’s a space under it about the size of a shoebox.
My mother had kept the Christmas money there. Two hundred dollars, in an envelope, from January to December, and when I was seven she’d shown me the board and the envelope and said, this is the only secret in this house, and now it’s yours too, and I had carried that for twenty-four years like a coin in my pocket. The only secret in this house.
I heard his boots on the joists. The ceiling creaked over the hall and then over the kitchen and then stopped.
“There’s a board,” he called down.
“Press the near end.”
A pause. A scrape.
“There’s a tin.”
I sat down on the floor of the hall. I hadn’t decided to. My knees just folded, and I went down onto the boards my mother had waxed every spring, with my back against the wall and my hands under my belly, and I listened to a deputy sheriff come backward down a ladder with a biscuit tin held against his chest in one hand like a man carrying an egg.
It was the blue one. The one with the Scottish castle on the lid, that had held buttons when I was small.
He set it in my lap.
“I didn’t open it,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m going to go stand on the porch now.”
He went. I heard the screen door. I sat in my mother’s hall with the tin on what was left of my lap and the dust coming down through the attic hatch in the light like something falling very slowly, and I took the lid off.
* * *
The ledger was on top.
Green cloth, gone soft at the corners, the spine cracked white where it had been opened a thousand times at the same place. The same book. I knew it before I touched it; I’d seen it against her chest in a field in 1998 with her hair down. It was heavier than it looked. Under it there was a bundle of thin yellow carbon copies tied with string, and under those a cassette tape in a case with no label, and under that, flat against the bottom of the tin, a plain white envelope.
I didn’t open the envelope. Not yet. I undid the string on the carbons.
They were inspection reports. County forms, the old kind, three-part, with the pink copy torn off; my mother had kept the yellow. Foundation inspections, framing inspections, electrical, for addresses all over the county that I half knew, a strip mall on the highway, the medical building by the hospital, a subdivision out past the water tower that had been the first thing with the Whitlock name on it that I’d ever noticed as a child. Every one of them stamped APPROVED. Every one of them signed at the bottom with the same quick slash of initials.
R.D.
I put them down. I picked up the cassette, which had nothing written on it at all, and held it for a moment, and put it down too, because I didn’t have anything to play it on and because some part of me already knew whose voice would be on it.
I opened the book.
My mother’s handwriting. Columns. I’d known it would be columns—she couldn’t write a grocery list without ruling it—but seeing it was different, the dates down the left in her small upright hand, the descriptions in the middle, the figures on the right in the blue ink she’d bought by the box. Whitlock Dev. — General Ledger — R. Cole. January 1992. Page after page of it. Payroll. Materials. Equipment. The ordinary breath of a company, in and out, in and out, for six years.
I turned the pages the way you’d walk through a house.
It was clean. That was the thing. It was the cleanest set of books I’d ever seen, and I’d seen the feed store’s, which were a prayer and a shoebox, and I’d seen the three months of Grant’s household accounts he’d let me do before he’d decided it upset me. Every figure footed. Every month closed. If you’d handed it to an auditor he’d have gone home early.
And then, in June of 1998, the handwriting changed.
Not the person. The pressure. The same letters, but pressed harder, so that the ink had gone through to the back of the page, and the columns had started to lean. There were pages at the end that weren’t ledger pages at all. Lists. Dates, and initials, and amounts, and a word next to each one. Inspection. Variance. Permit. Inspection. Inspection. The initials repeated. R.D. twelve times. T.M. seven. Amounts that weren’t payroll amounts. Amounts that didn’t foot to anything in the clean pages before them, because they’d never been meant to.
Cash out, with no column to go in.
I’d been a bookkeeper for seven years. I knew exactly what I was looking at, and I knew that my mother had known, and I knew, because the handwriting told me, what it had cost her to write it down.
The last page was dated the ninth of July, 1998. One line.
Told W.W. today that I won’t do it. He said think of the girl.
I sat there.
The girl. Me. Three years old, at Mrs. Pruitt’s or the church daycare while my mother sat in an office downtown and was told by a man with his arm around her shoulders in a photograph to think of me.
She’d thought of me. She’d quit. She’d gone to work at the school office for eleven dollars an hour and she’d made curtains out of a church tablecloth and she’d never said the word Whitlock in her kitchen, and she’d kept this, in a tin, under a board, for twenty-eight years, and she’d died on a Wednesday afternoon while I sat in a dentist’s waiting room because my husband had told me there was no hurry.
* * *
A car door shut outside.
I knew the sound. I’d have known it in my sleep; I had, in fact, woken to it a thousand nights, the particular soft expensive sound of that door closing in the drive on Fairmont. I got the lid back on the tin before I’d finished the thought.
Then Deputy Okoro’s voice from the porch, not loud. “Sir. Stop where you are.”
I got up. I don’t know how. I got up with the tin under my arm and the ledger inside it and I went to the front window, to the lemon curtains, and I looked through the gap my mother had always looked through when a car she didn’t know came down Juniper Lane.
The silver car was at the curb, behind the deputy’s. Grant was standing beside it on the sidewalk with the door still open and the engine still running, in a pale blue shirt with no jacket, and he had both hands out and open and the smile on, the whole smile, for the street.
“Deputy. I’m not coming any closer. You can see I’m not.”
“Sir, you’re within five hundred feet of twenty-two Juniper Lane. I’m asking you once to get back in your vehicle.”
“This is my property. I own this parcel. I’m entitled to know who’s in it.”
“You’re entitled to read the order your lawyer was handed, sir. Get in the car.”
Grant looked at the house. He looked right at the window, and I knew he couldn’t see me through the curtains, I’d stood on that sidewalk myself as a girl and tried, but he looked at the gap in the lemons like he could, and he ran two fingers down the front of his shirt where the tie would have been.
“Lena,” he called. Pleasant. Carrying. “Whatever’s up there, it’s company property. You know that. Everything in that house was inventoried in May. Anything that wasn’t on the inventory belongs to the estate, and the estate belongs to—”
“Sir, I’m counting to three.”
“—so you might as well bring it down and hand it to the deputy and save everyone the—”
“One.”
Grant stopped. He looked at Okoro, really looked, for the first time, the way he’d looked at the judge on the steps when she’d said the word witness. Then he laughed, and shook his head, and got back into the silver car and shut the soft expensive door, and the car pulled away from the curb at exactly the speed limit, and turned at the end of Juniper, and was gone.
Deputy Okoro stood on the porch for a while after it had gone. Then he came in.
“He knew,” I said. “He knew there was something. He didn’t say what are you doing, he said whatever’s up there.”
“I heard him.”
“They cleared this house in May looking for it. That’s what the filing cabinet was. That’s what the truck was. They didn’t want the furniture.” I had the tin against my chest with both arms, the way my mother had held the book in the field. “And when they didn’t find it, he needed the house itself. He needed it legally his, so that whatever was in it was legally his too. And then he needed it gone.”
“Ma’am,” said Deputy Okoro, “I’m going to write down that you said that, and I’m going to write down what he said, and then I’m going to drive you back two doors, and I’d like you to not open that tin again until Ms. Ruiz is sitting next to you. Not because I don’t trust you. Because I’d like there to be a witness.”
* * *
There was a witness.
There were two: Teddy in the red raincoat, who came straight from the State’s Attorney’s office with a yellow receipt for the complaint still in her hand, and Mrs. Pruitt, who stood at her own stove with the wooden spoon again and did not pretend to do anything with it. I sat at the table under the curtains with the tin in front of me and took everything out of it in order and laid it on the oilcloth. The ledger. The carbons. The tape. The envelope.
Mrs. Pruitt looked at the green book for a long time without touching it.
“She brought that home every night,” she said finally. “For a year, maybe more. In a canvas bag, like a schoolbook. I’d see her go up the walk with it at six o’clock and she’d have it at the kitchen table at eleven when I took the trash out. I asked her once what it was.” The spoon moved, a little. “She said church accounts. Ruth Cole, who hadn’t been to church since your christening. And I let her say it, Lena. I let her, because she had a look, and because that’s what you do on this street.”
Teddy read the last pages of the ledger standing up. Her gum stopped on R.D.
“Do you know who that is?”
“No.”
“I might.” She didn’t say more. She put the book down very gently, as if it had gone fragile in her hands, and picked up the envelope, and turned it over, and went still.
“What,” I said.
She put it down in front of me, writing side up.
It wasn’t sealed. It had never been sealed; the flap was just tucked, the way my mother tucked birthday cards so you could reuse the envelope. There was no stamp and no address. There was one line on the front in blue ink, in the small upright hand that had ruled every grocery list of my childhood, and it had been written, by the look of it, a long time after the rest.
For Miriam Hale, if she still wants it.
I read it three times. Then I sat back in Mrs. Pruitt’s chair with my hands under my belly and I thought about a small grey-haired woman on a courthouse step, bending at the knees to pick up a torn page, and reading it over her glasses for four long seconds before she set her coffee down.
Page four. The exhibit list. The line that said Estate of Ruth Cole.
She hadn’t put the cup down for me.
