Chapter 8 - The Ledger of Old Mill Road
The closing on the Old Mill Road property took place on the second Friday of October in the small, wood-paneled conference room of the Wake County Register of Deeds building on Salisbury Street.
It was not a long proceeding.
Marcus Vance sat at the head of the oak table, his gold fountain pen resting beside three copies of the Deed of Consolidation and Surrender of Life Estate.
Diane Bennett sat on his left.
She was seventy-three now, and she had aged five years since the morning the hammer hit the asphalt.
She wore a gray wool cardigan over her blue dress, though the October morning was sixty-eight degrees, her hands clasped tightly in her lap over her white vinyl purse. She did not look at me. She looked at the brass seal of the State of North Carolina mounted on the wall between the two bookshelves.
Shayla was not there.
Under the terms of the diversion agreement, her presence was waived; her signature had been executed forty-eight hours earlier in the presence of her public defender and the clerk of superior court in an annex building two blocks away.
"Mrs. Bennett," Marcus Vance said, his voice gentle, with that old-school Raleigh courtesy that treats an eviction like a church announcement. "You understand that under this instrument, the home place on Old Mill Road is transferred in fee simple absolute to your daughter, Catherine Bennett."
Diane nodded once.
The movement was tiny, like a dry leaf falling from a twig.
"And you understand," Marcus continued, "that under the lease-back agreement executed concurrently, you have the right to occupy the master bedroom, the kitchen, and the rear garden porch for the remainder of your natural life, with all real property taxes, structural maintenance, hazard insurance, and utility charges to be satisfied directly by Catherine Bennett."
"Yes," Mom whispered.
She picked up the pen.
Her fingers were stiff, the joints swollen with the arthritis she had complained about since nineteen-ninety-eight, but she did not drop the barrel.
She signed her name.
Diane B. Bennett.
The script was small, spidery, the ink gray where the pressure had wavered across the legal seal, but it was straight. It sat on the line Arthur had surveyed forty years ago, North eighty-nine degrees East, without an eighth of an inch of variance.
I signed beneath her.
My surveyor's C—sharp, flat, vertical, with the plumb-bob tail.
Marcus applied the heavy purple stamp.
RECORDED — WAKE COUNTY REGISTER OF DEEDS — BOOK 19488, PAGE 0112.
The clerk took the original, slipped it into a red-rope folder, and closed the drawer of the metal desk with a heavy, metallic chunk that signaled the end of the Bennett family estate.
We walked out into the bright autumn light together.
The plaza between the courthouse and the municipal building was full of state workers in short-sleeved shirts eating their lunch from paper bags, the pigeons fluttering among the granite planters where the yellow chrysanthemums had just been bedded for the season.
My mother stopped by the low concrete wall beside the fountain.
She did not reach for my arm.
She stood looking down at her white purse, her fingers working the brass clasp—open, shut, open, shut: click, clack, click, clack.
"Your sister is moving to Wilmington, Catherine," she said.
Her voice had no anger in it now. It had only that thin, dry residue that remains after a cistern has been pumped dry and the silt has baked in the sun.
"Ryan has a job on the docks," she said. "Running a forklift for the fertilizer plant. They have an apartment in a brick building near the river."
"I know, Mom," I said.
"She says she's never coming back to Wake County."
"She can't come back to Wake County for three years, Mom," I told her, my voice level and quiet in the warm air. "That's part of the probation."
Mom looked up then.
Her glasses were clean, and without the tortoiseshell frames, her eyes looked smaller than I had ever remembered them—small, pale blue, like the sky over the coast when the wind is out of the north.
"Arthur would have hated this, Catherine," she said.
"No, Mom," I said.
I reached out and took her hand.
Her fingers were cold, but I did not let them go. I held them with that firm, unyielding pressure my father had used when he showed me how to keep the transit level against the wind.
"Dad would have hated the lie," I told her.
"He wouldn't have cared about the paper. He wouldn't have cared about the money. But he would have walked from here to Garner in his stocking feet before he let one of his girls steal a roof from the other."
She looked at our hands—my brown, legal-firm knuckles holding her thin, liver-spotted fingers—and for the first time in thirty-eight years, she did not pull away.
She let out a long, slow breath that smelled of peppermint and dry paper, her shoulders dropping two inches beneath the gray cardigan.
"The roof on the kitchen leaks, Catherine," she whispered.
May you like
"I know, Mom," I said.
"David looked at it on Sunday," I told her. "He's coming out with two rolls of modified bitumen and three bundles of thirty-year architectural shingles tomorrow morning at seven."
