Chapter 3 - The Anatomy of a Gift
A gift letter for a conventional residential mortgage is a very specific legal instrument.
It is designed by federal underwriters to prevent secondary lienholders from claiming equity in a property that the primary lender has financed. It requires the donor to swear under penalty of federal bank fraud that the money provided is not a loan, that there is no secondary promissory note tucked into a drawer, and that the applicant does not owe the donor a single afternoon of labor, a single bushel of corn, or a single square inch of the dirt being purchased.
On Monday morning at seven-thirty, I was sitting in the office of Robert Bannister on the sixth floor of the First National Bank building in Oklahoma City.
The office did not look like an attorney's office in the movies. There were no leather-bound volumes of Blackstone on the shelves; there were three computer monitors, two large green recycling bins filled with shredded title documents, and an old commercial coffee maker that smelled like burned Chicory.
Bob Bannister was sixty-eight years old, with the dry, papery skin of a lifelong smoker and a tie that had been out of style since the second Bush administration. He had been my father’s attorney thirty years ago, before Arlin decided that lawyers were just "men who charged you two hundred dollars an hour to tell you what you couldn't do."
Bob had my file spread across his desk.
"Your father called my house at six-fifteen this morning, Crystal," Bob said, adjusting his glasses with his thumb.
"I'm sorry, Bob," I said. "I told him to leave it with the office."
"Oh, don't apologize to me. I’ve known Arlin since we were both eighteen at Central State. He told me he was going to have me disbarred for gross conflict of interest because I prepared the affidavit for you on Friday."
"Can he do that?"
Bob let out a dry, wheezing chuckle that ended in a cough. "He can file a grievance with the Bar Association on a piece of greasy butcher paper if he wants to pay the filing fee. But since I haven't represented Arlin Eubanks since nineteen-ninety-four—when he tried to avoid paying a subcontractor for six hundred tons of limestone aggregate on the Guthrie bypass—the ethics committee will throw it in the round file before lunch."
He tapped the second page of the packet—the forged permit application.
"This is the dangerous part, Crystal," Bob said, his voice losing its humor. "This isn't family squabbling. This is a Class D felony under Oklahoma Statutes Title 21, Section 1561. Arlin didn't just sign your name; he certified under penalty of law that he was the authorized agent of record, and he used Danielle’s phone number as the primary contact for the structural plan review."
"What does the city want to do?"
"Bart called me at eight o'clock," Bob said. "The city attorney’s office is inclined to let it drop if the ground is restored and the permit is formally withdrawn with an administrative fee of two hundred and fifty dollars. They don't want the headache of prosecuting a seventy-one-year-old retired DOT supervisor unless the property owner insists on filing a formal criminal complaint with the police department."
He looked at me over the rims of his lenses.
"Do you want him arrested, Crystal?"
The question hung in the air between us, smelling of old paper and lukewarm coffee.
I looked out the window. Down below, the traffic on Robinson Avenue was moving in a steady, gray line through the drizzle. People were going to work. Men with briefcases, women with umbrellas, delivery drivers hauling boxes into the basement entrance of the bank. Normal lives. People who didn't have to carry twenty-one years of family debts in an envelope beneath an egg-dye box.
"No," I whispered. "I don't want him in jail. If he goes to jail, Danielle spends the next ten years telling my nephews that their aunt put their grandfather in a cell because she was selfish about a workshop."
"Then we use it as a wall," Bob said. He pulled a fresh yellow legal pad toward him and uncapped a rollerball pen. "We draft a formal settlement and release of claims. Arlin pays the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar cancellation fee to the City of Edmond. He pays Darren Petway’s mobilization fee—which Darren agreed to reduce to five hundred dollars because he doesn't want his license dragged into a fraud investigation. And in exchange, you agree not to refer the forged application to the district attorney."
"And Danielle?"
"Danielle signs a separate trespass admonition," Bob said, his pen scratching across the yellow paper with a dry, rhythmic sound. "If she, Chad, or those two boys set foot on Lot 4 of the Eubanks Addition without your written, notarized permission, they are subject to immediate summary arrest by the Logan County Sheriff. No warnings. No family conferences. No dinner."
He stopped writing and looked up.
"It will kill whatever is left between you and your father, Crystal."
"It's already dead, Bob," I said. "It died when Callie’s face hit that foundation block."
Bob nodded slowly. He didn't offer any platitudes about how blood was thicker than water. He had practiced law in Oklahoma long enough to know that blood was mostly just good at carrying an infection from one generation to the next.
"I'll have the papers couriered to his house in Guthrie by two o'clock," Bob said. "He’ll sign them. He’ll yell at the courier, he’ll call me four kinds of an old thief, and then he’ll sign them, because Arlin knows what the inside of the Logan County jail looks like. He helped pour the footings for the drunk tank in nineteen-eighty-one."
I stood up, took my purse from the floor, and reached for my raincoat.
"Thank you, Bob."
"Crystal?" he called as I reached the door.
I turned back.
"Your mother came by the office this morning," he said softly.
My hand froze on the brass latch. "Martha?"
"She was waiting on the bench outside the building when I came in at seven," Bob said. He reached into his center drawer and pulled out a small, faded blue envelope—the kind older women keep in the back of their cedar chests for church sympathies. "She didn't come up. She said her knees were too bad for the elevator. She asked me to give this to you."
He held it out across the desk.
The paper was soft, the corners rounded from being carried in a handbag. Across the front, written in the cramped, careful Palmer method she had learned at the convent school in Shawnee sixty years ago, was my name: Crystal Ann.
I didn't open it in the elevator. I didn't open it in the lobby.
I took it out to my car, sat in the driver’s seat with the windshield wipers off and the rain drumming against the roof, and slit the flap with my thumbnail.
Inside were three things.
The first was a five-hundred-dollar cashier's check drawn on the Guthrie National Bank, dated Saturday morning.
The second was a small piece of ivory batiste fabric, three inches square, cut from the hem of Callie’s dress before it had been ruined, showing the delicate eyelet embroidery Martha had spent four weeks stitching.
The third was a note written on a piece of lined ledger paper:
Crystal Ann, The money is from my egg account. Arlin doesn't have his name on this signature card. Pay the contractor his fee so your father doesn't have an excuse to come back down your road. I took Callie’s measurements off the closet door before we left on Sunday. I have enough of the yellow cloth left in the trunk to make another dress. I will leave it with Bob when it is finished. Don't hate your father too hard. He was raised by a man who beat him with an engine belt when the hay got wet, and he thinks the only way you keep people from leaving you is to make sure they can't afford the ticket. Be good to that little girl. Your Mother.
May you like
I sat in the car for a long time, holding that small square of eyelet against my palm until the paper took the heat of my skin.
The rain kept coming down, washing the dust off the hood, washing the soot off the bank building, running in long, greasy channels down Robinson Avenue toward the river.
