I called her from my kitchen because I wanted to hear what she’d say before my lawyer contacted her, and she answered like she’d been expecting me. I asked her why she’d signed my mother’s name, and she said she hadn’t signed it as my mother — she’d signed it because my mother had asked her to after her hands became too weak to write. I told her my power of attorney didn’t allow anyone else to sign employment records, and she said my mother knew that. Then she told me something I didn’t know: the employment agreement wasn’t created in 2010 for the woman in the lawsuit. It had been created because my mother had promised someone she would pay for taking care of a person she couldn’t bring into the house. I asked who that person was, and she said, “Your brother.”
I don’t have a brother. At least that’s what I’ve believed my entire life. My mother had one child, me, and every family record I’ve ever seen says the same thing. The woman told me she had never met him either, but she’d been the one driving my mother to church every Sunday because my mother insisted on visiting him afterward. I asked where, and she gave me an address about twenty minutes outside town. I drove there that afternoon and found a small house with a wheelchair ramp and a name on the mailbox that I recognized from my mother’s old checkbook. There were checks written every month for eleven years, all for the same amount, all made out to that address. I had assumed they were donations because my mother never talked about her finances. Then I noticed the oldest check was dated two months before the employment agreement.
I took photographs of everything and brought them to my lawyer. He pulled the property records and found that my mother had purchased the house in 2010 under a trust I had never heard of. The beneficiary wasn’t me. It was a man whose name meant nothing to me, but whose date of birth made my stomach drop. He was exactly nine months younger than me. My lawyer told me not to contact him until we’d checked the rest of the records, so we requested the original trust documents. They arrived three days later, and there was a handwritten letter from my mother attached to them. It said she’d spent forty years protecting me from something she believed would destroy our family, and that she’d hired the woman who was now suing the estate because she was the only person she trusted to keep visiting the man without telling me. At the bottom, my mother had written one final sentence: “He’s your brother, and your father knew about him before you were born.”
