I asked the contractor to read the name again. He said the woman had hired him in December, paid cash, and told him the house would eventually belong to her. I asked whether he’d seen her before. He said she came every few weeks to check the work and always used the same key I had. I showed him a photograph of my mother, and he said that was the woman who had given him the instructions. Except my mother had been in the nursing home since 2021 and couldn’t walk without assistance. Then he pulled up the original estimate. The customer’s phone number wasn’t my mother’s. It was mine.
I called the number on the invoice, expecting some explanation. A woman answered and said, “You’re early.” I asked who she was. She hung up. I called again, and this time she said my mother had told her everything would be hers after she died. I told her my mother was still alive. There was a pause, and then she asked whether I’d checked the attic. I drove back to the house and climbed up there for the first time in years. There were moving boxes stacked along one wall, all labeled with dates from the last three years. Inside were photographs, dishes, clothes, and family documents. None of them belonged to my mother. They belonged to someone who had apparently been living there.
Then I found a folder taped beneath the attic floorboards. It contained monthly electric bills, repair invoices, and a lease agreement for the house. The tenant’s name was the same woman from the contractor’s invoice. The lease had started three years earlier. I called the utility company and asked who had been making the payments. They said the account had been transferred into my mother’s name in 2023, but the payments came from a bank account belonging to a woman with a completely different last name. I took the folder to my mother’s nursing home and asked whether she had ever signed anything giving someone permission to use the house. My mother looked at the lease, then at me, and started crying. She said, “I didn’t rent her the house. Your father did. And I never told you because he made me promise you’d never find out what happened in that room.”
