Six Forty-Eight In The Morning

"Lottie, where were you at six forty-eight in the morning on June tenth?"

Gil Tanaka asked me that on Monday before he'd even sat down. He'd come in a brown suit that fit him twenty pounds ago and a tie with little ducks on it, and he was carrying a manila folder as thick as a church hymnal. Tamika had let him through the heavy door and I'd watched him through the little diamond-wired window, standing very straight while she punched in the code, and I loved him a little for how hard he was pretending this was a normal law office.

"June tenth," I said.

"A Wednesday."

"Church. The bake sale. I set up the tables every second Wednesday, six-fifteen, before it gets hot." I stared at him. "Why?"

He opened the folder on my bed and spread it across the flowered quilt. "This is the petition. Your son's lawyer is a fellow out of Clinton named Curtis Lyle. He filed seven exhibits. I pulled copies from the clerk this morning. I want you to look at them with me and I want you to tell me the truth even when it's embarrassing."

"I've been telling the truth for six months, Gil. It hasn't helped."

"That's because you've been telling it to Wade."

Exhibit A was the deputy's report from September.

I read it with my reading glasses on and my jaw tight. Subject located walking southbound on State Route 5 at approximately 2040 hours. Appeared disoriented. Stated her son had "left her at the lake." Unable to state the date. Son, Wade Haskett, reported her missing from his residence at approximately 1930 hours after she walked out during the evening meal.

"I was never at his house that night," I said.

"Tell me what happened."

So I told him. Wade called at six and said a customer at Kettle Cove marina was selling a pontoon boat cheap and would I ride out and look at it with him, because Dale always had the better eye for hulls. Of course I went. You go when your son asks you to look at something your husband would have looked at. We drove out in his truck. He parked by the bait shop and told me to sit on the bench out front while he went around back to find the man. I left my purse in the truck because I didn't think I'd need it.

I sat on that bench for forty minutes. The sun went down behind the water. The bait shop closed. When I walked around back there was no man and no pontoon boat, and when I walked around front there was no truck.

"My phone was in my purse," I said. "My purse was in the truck. I thought he'd had an emergency at the shop. I thought, he'll come back. And when he didn't come back I started walking home, because it's only four miles and I've walked farther."

"And the deputy asked you the date."

"He asked what year it was, and I told him. Then he asked what day it was, and I said Sunday, and he wrote something down, and I found out later it was Saturday." I heard my own voice crack and I hated it. "I'd been sitting in the dark on a bench wondering if my son was dead in a ditch, Gil. I lost track of a day."

Gil wrote it all down. Then he tapped the report. "It's your word against his. And his word came with a phone call to 911 and a deputy's signature."

Exhibit B was a photograph of my stove, the front left burner red. It was dated August twentieth, 1:14 p.m. I'd been at the Lakeside Market then. I told Gil so. He wrote that down too. My word again.

Exhibit C was the freezer.

It was a color printout from somebody's phone, a little blurry. My freezer door open, frost smoking out, my keys on the bottom shelf, and sitting on top of them, a half-gallon of butter pecan. Printed along the bottom edge, in the small gray type that phones put on photos when a lawyer's secretary doesn't know how to turn it off, were the words JUNE 10, 6:48 AM.

I took off my glasses and put them back on. The words stayed.

"He told me he found them at noon," I said. "Called me right then, from my kitchen. Said he'd just gotten back from a boat show in Springfield, gone since Thursday."

"Springfield is three hours."

"Late morning, he told me. Dropped off paint and used the key under the frog."

"The frog."

"The ceramic frog by the back step. Dale put a key under it in 1991." I pressed my finger on the gray numbers. "Gil, at six forty-eight that morning I was in the church fellowship hall setting out lemon bars. He was in my kitchen. He was in my kitchen taking a picture of my freezer five hours before he said he found my keys, while he was supposed to be in Springfield."

Gil didn't say anything for a while. He looked at the photo for a long time, and then he looked at me over the top of it, and I saw something change in his face. It wasn't belief yet. It was the thing right before belief, when a man who's spent a lifetime reading contracts finds a date in the wrong place.

"Why would he photograph it before he'd found it?" Gil said quietly.

"Because he didn't find it. He put it there." I said it out loud for the first time. It came out flat and ugly and true. "He put my keys under his daddy's ice cream and waited for me to come home."

"Lottie."

"You asked for the truth."

"I did. And I'm going to give you some back." He took the photo gently out of my fingers and put it face-down. "Phone clocks can be wrong. Time zone settings. Some secretary who printed the wrong copy. Lyle will say any of those things and a judge will believe him, because the alternative is that a son drove three hours at dawn to hide his mother's keys in a freezer. You and I both know how that sounds."

"It sounds true."

"It sounds paranoid." He said it very gently. "That's the word they're going to use. That's the word that's already in this file."

It was in Exhibit F.

Exhibit F was an affidavit, notarized, two pages. According to it, on July fourteenth the Respondent repeatedly called her granddaughter by the wrong name and became agitated when corrected. Further, on several occasions the Respondent expressed paranoid beliefs that family members were entering her home and moving her belongings. And the Affiant was concerned for the safety of the minor child in the Respondent's care and had ceased allowing unsupervised visits as of August.

It was signed Brynn Marie Haskett, in the same small square hand as the note in my suitcase.

"I called Poppy Shayla once," I said. My voice was very steady, which is how I knew how angry I was. "One time. On the dock. Shayla Monroe was a little girl on my bus who used to fall in the lake every summer, and Poppy fell in the lake, and I yelled the wrong name. I called Wade by the dog's name his whole childhood. My mother called me Bernice until the day she died, and Bernice was the cow."

"I believe you."

"She was standing right there. She laughed, Gil. Brynn laughed. It's the only time I ever heard her laugh at my house."

"I believe you," he said again. "The judge won't hear the laugh. The judge will read this."

I looked at the date at the top of the affidavit. September twenty-sixth. Six days before the emergency order. Signed and notarized and handed over to my son's lawyer while I was still driving out to their place for Sunday supper and she was passing me the rolls and saying nothing to me at all.

And now her note was in my suitcase, telling me not to fight.

Gil put the exhibits back in the folder one by one, squaring the edges. When he was done he sat with his big hands flat on top of it.

"Here's what matters this week," he said. "Wednesday at ten, a court visitor named Denise Holloway is coming to interview you. She works for the court, not for Wade and not for us. She'll talk to you for an hour. She'll ask the date and what medications you take. Then she watches how you eat and how you talk to the staff, and then she writes a report, and Judge Mabry will read that report before she reads anything I write."

"One hour."

"One hour. If Holloway says you're competent, we have a real hearing on the seventeenth. If she says you're not, the temporary order becomes a permanent one, and Wade is your guardian until you die." He didn't soften it. I'd have thrown him out if he had. "And Lottie, she will be listening very carefully for one thing in particular."

"Paranoia."

"Blame. Anybody who says my family is plotting against me. Anybody who says somebody else is moving my things." He tapped Exhibit F through the folder. "Because it's already written down here that you say that. If you say it to her, you're proving their case for them."

"And if it's true?"

"Then we need proof that isn't your memory. Something a stranger can hold in her hand."

He stood and buttoned the suit jacket over the duck tie. At the door he turned.

"Don't accuse anyone. Wade, Brynn, nobody. Not to Holloway, not to the staff, not to that nice girl who works the desk. Give me your word."

I promised. And then I sat in that green chair after he was gone and watched the stripes crawl across the floor while the afternoon went orange, and I counted.

Forty-four hours until Denise Holloway walked through the heavy door. Forty-four hours to find something a stranger could hold in her hand, from inside a locked hallway where I didn't even know the code, without once saying out loud the only thing I knew for certain: that somebody in my family had been in my kitchen at six forty-eight in the morning, and had lied about it.