Chapter 8

Grant came in through the mudroom door and stopped when he saw the three of us at the table.

Gerald didn't raise his voice. That was the thing about it. He asked one question - "Did you tell your mother it was for insurance?" - and when Grant didn't answer, Gerald told him to go home, and that they would speak in the morning, and that it would not be in this house.

Monday at nine, Gerald picked me up. He drove. He didn't say much.

At the bank I signed a forgery affidavit in front of Deborah Vance and a notary, and the line of credit against Chestnut Street was voided that afternoon. At the title company, the closing on my house was marked dead on the file, and the earnest money went back to Gerald, who never cashed the check. He put it in a kitchen drawer and told me it could sit there.

The consequences took about two weeks to arrive, and then arrived all at once.

Grant's biggest client, a developer named Rennick who had known Gerald for forty years, pulled the framing and finish work off his crew and gave it to a company out of Wilkes-Barre. Grant let his two men go. He rented a room above a garage on Water Street, and one evening in the driveway on Ridge Road, Gerald stood with his hands in his cardigan pockets and told his son he was not to set foot in the Chestnut Street house until Nora invited him.

That was the end of it, as far as the town was concerned. It talked for a month and then it didn't.

I kept Sunday afternoons. Grant comes to my parents' front room at one o'clock and gets three hours with Wren on the rug, and I sit in the kitchen with the door open so I can hear her laugh. It isn't forgiveness. It's a fence line, and I intend to keep it.

Audrey still comes on Thursdays with a casserole she doesn't need to bring. Gerald fixed the porch step on Chestnut Street in April and wouldn't take anything for it. I sleep at my parents' for now, but that house is mine, and in June I'll put Wren's crib back in the room at the top of the stairs.

Three weeks after the dinner, a certified envelope came from a law office in Ridgeway, a town two hours west that I have never lived in.

Inside was a warranty deed, dated three months before my wedding, transferring a small house into my name alone, paid in full. The seller was listed as Renata Sable.

There was a second page - a photocopy of something older and yellowed, a deed carrying my mother's signature, young and looping, dated thirty-one years ago.

I drove to my parents' that afternoon and put the papers on the kitchen table. My mother was pouring tea.

"Mom," I said. "Who is Renata Sable?"

Diane Pruitt set the teacup down in the saucer. She looked at the deed for a long moment.

"I haven't heard that name in thirty years," she said.

Then she walked out of the room.

My father came in from the garage and stood in the doorway looking at the empty chair, and then at me.

"Give her the night, Nor," he said. "She's been carrying this since before you were born."

I sat alone at that table with the deed under my hand and the back door open to the cold, and I read the old signature again.

Who is Renata Sable - and what has my own mother been hiding for thirty years? Read the next part - link in the first comment.