…you. Margaret Ellis. And your late husband, Frank. Joint tenants. Frank put both your names on the deed when you paid off the mortgage. Your son is listed nowhere.”
I put down my coffee cup.
Two years earlier, when Frank and I paid off the last of the mortgage on our son’s house, Frank had insisted on meeting with our attorney first. “Just to make it official,” he’d said. I’d signed a stack of papers without reading them closely. I assumed it was a gift deed. I’d told my son, Kevin, the house was his.
It turns out Frank, who’d been a careful man for seventy-four years, had done something different. When we paid off the loan, he had the house refinanced into our names. Kevin and his wife could live there as long as they wanted. But they didn’t own it. We did. And now that Frank was gone, I did.
“Why?” I asked my attorney. “Why would Frank do that without telling me?”
“There’s a letter in his file,” Mr. Brooks said. “He asked me to give it to you if you ever needed it.”
The letter was short. In Frank’s handwriting.
“Margie, I love our boy. But I’ve watched his wife for six years, and I don’t trust her with our money. If I’m right, you’ll need a roof that’s yours. If I’m wrong, you can sign it over to him whenever you like. Either way, I want you to be the one who decides. — F.”
I sat in Mr. Brooks’s office and cried. Then I laughed. Frank had been gone eight months, and he was still taking care of me.
I went home that evening. My daughter-in-law, Brittany, was at the kitchen table with her laptop, working on what she called “the family budget.” She looked up and said, “Your first payment’s due Friday.”
I sat down across from her. I put a copy of the deed on the table. And a document of my own.
“This is a rental agreement,” I said pleasantly. “For you and Kevin. For my house. Eighteen hundred a month. I thought that was a fair number. You chose it, after all.”
She read the deed. Then she read it again. Her face went from pink to white to red.
Kevin came home an hour later. I showed him the deed and his father’s letter. He read the letter twice. Then he sat down hard.
“Mom,” he said. “I didn’t know Brittany was going to do that. I swear.”
“You signed it too, Kevin,” I said. “Your name was on the agreement.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that.
I didn’t make them pay rent. I’m not cruel. But I told them I’d be moving into the master bedroom, which is, after all, in my house. And that we’d be having a family meeting with a counselor every Thursday, if they wanted to keep living there.
They agreed. Brittany doesn’t talk to me much. Kevin and I are slowly finding our way back. Last week, he brought me coffee in bed and said, “Dad knew, didn’t he? About all of it.”
“Your father knew everything,” I said. “He just didn’t always tell me until I needed it.”
