Chapter 4: What My Son Could Not Explain
I set page three on the sideboard face-up so Marcus could see it from where he was standing.
He looked at it for a long time.
"That's not my signature," he said.
"Marcus —" Brittany started.
"That is not my signature." He picked up the page and held it under the light.
His hand was shaking.
"I have never signed anything that looked like this.
My signature has a loop on the M.
This doesn't have a loop.
This is —" He stopped.
"A forgery," Pastor Gideon said.
The word landed in the room like something dropped from a great height.
Brittany moved toward the door.
Corinne was faster.
She stepped sideways without a word and filled the doorway with her considerable self, and she folded her arms, and she looked at Brittany the way a woman looks at something she has decided not to allow.
"Nobody's leaving," Corinne said pleasantly, "until Dorothy says they can."
"You cannot keep me here," Brittany said.
"This is harassment."
"Honey, I'm just standing in a doorway." Corinne smiled.
"You go right ahead and call it what you like."
Marcus set the page down.
He turned to his wife, and I watched his face do something I had never seen it do in thirty-four years.
It closed.
Every warm thing in it went somewhere else, and what was left was a stranger I did not recognize and was not sure I wanted to.
"Did you forge my name?" he said.
"I did what I had to do."
"Brittany.
Did you forge my name on a legal document to take my mother's house away from her."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Your mother has been the problem in this marriage since the day we got engaged.
She never liked me.
She never accepted me.
You always chose her.
This was the only way to make sure that when she's gone, there's something left for us and not just —"
"She's not gone," Marcus said.
"She's standing right here.
It's her birthday."
Brittany's mouth snapped shut.
"You forged my name," he said again, like he was trying to learn a new language.
"You used a law firm to steal a house.
And then you came here tonight and knocked over her cake because you were afraid she'd open that envelope in front of everyone and you'd have to stand there and answer for it."
"It wasn't stealing.
It was estate planning."
"It has a forged signature on it, Brittany."
"Lawyers make mistakes with signatures all the time.
It's a clerical —"
"Stop." His voice was flat now.
Quiet.
Quieter than anger.
"I want you to stop talking."
She stopped.
He turned to me.
And the stranger in his face cracked right down the middle, and underneath it was just my boy, my Marcus, the nine-year-old Pastor Gideon had baptized in the river off Route 12, standing in front of me with his eyes full of something he didn't know how to carry.
"Mama," he said.
"I didn't know."
"I know you didn't, baby."
"I swear to you I didn't know."
"I know." I touched his face once, the way I had when he was small.
"We're going to fix it."
Vera, who had not said a single word since she stood up from her chair, turned to Brittany with her reading glasses pushed up on her head and said, "Child.
My nephew is a district attorney.
I have his number in my phone right now.
Do you want to reconsider what you just called a clerical error?"
The grandbaby woke up in the corner and started to cry.
May you like
Nobody moved to comfort it, because every eye in the room was on Brittany's face.
And Brittany said, "I want a lawyer."
