It had the key in it.”
“She gave you the house on paper.
She gave me the combination.”
PART 5 — FINAL
Mr. Okafor was right about the timing.
Months.
Then longer.
The trust part was clean — the lockbox came off Monday, the listing came down Tuesday, and the realtor sent a card that said “I’m so sorry” and nothing else, which was correct.
The criminal part took a year.
Financial exploitation of an elder.
Forgery.
Fraud.
Howard Bexley, faced with the difference between a golf friendship and a law license, described in a deposition exactly what my father had told him and when.
Bernadette testified for forty minutes and did not once look at the defense table.
Uncle Ray testified for six, and looked at nothing else.
There was one more thing at trial, and I want to put it down because it is the part I did not expect.
The prosecutor played the eleven minutes for the jury.
All of it.
And at the end — after “she’s out of it,” after “date it Tuesday” — there is a sound the courtroom heard that I had somehow never noticed on the living room floor.
My grandmother, on the recording, after my father’s footsteps leave the room.
Very quiet.
Very clear.
“Well, Neil.
You set it down.”
My father took a plea.
Four years.
Restitution he cannot pay, from a business that closed the month the story reached the church.
My mother was not charged.
She testified against him, which is a sentence I have decided not to have feelings about.
The pound cake recipe, by the way, has a note at the bottom in pencil.
“Kayla never asked for this.
Jenna did, at nine.
Give it to whoever asks.”
I have decided to take that as a rule for everything in the house.
Kayla and I have not spoken.
The fiancé’s family, I’m told, “reconsidered.”
The copy of the bracelet came back to me through Mr. Okafor’s office in a padded envelope, and I sold it for what a very good copy is worth — four hundred dollars — and put the money in the credit union account in Ridgeline, the one my grandmother had fed every Sunday for thirty-eight years from whatever was left in the register.
That account, it turned out, held three hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
