I asked the woman to tell me the name on the form again. She read it slowly, and the last name was my mother’s, but the first name wasn’t mine. I asked where the payments were going, and she gave me the Louisiana credit union and the account number. I didn’t recognize the account, but I recognized the address attached to it. It was an old apartment building where my mother had never lived. Then she told me the survivor form had been notarized in 2004, sixteen years before Mom died, and that the person listed as the daughter had provided identification when the account was established.
I drove to the apartment building that afternoon. The manager checked the old records and told me the woman I was looking for had moved out three months earlier, but she’d left a forwarding address. It was only forty minutes away, and the name on the mailbox wasn’t my mother’s or mine. I called the retirement system again and asked whether they could tell me where the original survivor form had been notarized. They could. It was a notary in our hometown, the same little office my mother used for her will. I drove there with her death certificate and asked to see the journal entry. The notary was retired, but her daughter still had the old books. The entry from 2004 had my mother’s name, a thumbprint, and a signature that looked exactly like hers.
Then I noticed the date beside the identification number. The driver’s license used to verify the woman on that form had been issued in 2004 — and the date of birth belonged to someone who would have been nineteen years old. My mother was already sixty-two. I asked the notary’s daughter whether she knew who had actually appeared that day. She looked at the page again and said her mother had written one note in the margin: “Client accompanied by daughter.” I told her I was an only child. She stared at me for a moment, then turned the page and found the attached photocopy. It wasn’t my mother’s identification. It was a birth certificate for a woman with my mother’s maiden name — and the mother’s name printed on it was Momma’s.
