Chapter 22 of 24Your Father Signed, Margo

Vic Cauldwell's letter said the Internal Revenue Service would be told about the cash on the joint returns, and that Margaret Ackerman's name was on every one of them. Two paragraphs, on letterhead, in the mail to the Sixth Street house Thursday. She carried it to the Corley square Monday morning and laid it beside the butterscotch dish on Diane Halloran's desk, envelope squared under it.

Diane read it with her pen cap between her teeth, which was her face for anything she did not intend to bill much time for.

"He's billing his client for the salutation," she said.

"Read the second paragraph."

"An agent opens this, pulls your file, and finds your disclosure stamped ahead of it." Diane set the page down and squared it to the legal pad. "You came forward voluntarily on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and filed for innocent-spouse relief the same day. There is nothing in this letter for Roy to report that you didn't already report, and the only name it puts in front of anybody is his."

"Cauldwell will send it anyway."

"He will. It'll read like a man explaining himself to a federal employee." She wrote a line in the margin and underlined it twice. "Thursday, at the conference, I'd rather hold his letter than mine."

Margo took the envelope back and filed it at the front of the accordion file, where the last thing in was the first thing out. "I'm going to Ada's."

"For what?"

"The year the sign changed." She tapped the file. "Walt's agreement is in here. The recorder has Walt's note for the buyout against the eleven acres, and nobody ever marked it paid. Ada's the only one left who was standing there."

Diane capped her pen. "She's his mother."

"She's eighty-two and she answers the door for me."

"Don't hand her your papers."

"I don't hand people papers," Margo said. "I hand them a casserole."

She stopped at the Kroger on the north side for a pint of Graeter's black raspberry chip at $6.99 and a can of french-fried onions at $2.29, because the onions on top were the part people remembered about her mother's casserole, and she was not walking in with a dish that had gone soft.

Ada Ackerman's house sat on the block behind St. Boniface, a plastic manger in the front window, a wreath still in its box on the porch chair. Roy's truck stood at the curb with two wheels up on the apron, and the back bedroom door was shut. Through it Margo heard him on the telephone, saying a thing twice and then laughing at his own second saying.

Ada took the dish with both hands and set it on the stove.

"It's my mother's," Margo said. "Green beans, onions on top."

"Rose made that for the parish picnic." Ada moved the dish an inch left, then an inch back. "She used the good beans and the cheap onions, and she said nobody would know the difference."

"She was right."

At the table Margo unfolded the copy of the agreement and turned it so it read right for Ada, which took a moment, the paper having been folded a long time.

Ada's hands came off the oilcloth and folded in her lap. "Where did that come from."

"Out of Walt's envelope in the fire safe at the shop."

"I never went in that safe."

"No, ma'am. I did. Twenty-four years I typed everything that came out of it, and I never once looked at what was in it." Margo flattened the crease with her thumb and let the quiet sit there on the table between them.

"What happened the year the sign changed?"

"I don't know what you're asking me."

"Page one has my father's name on it, beside Walt's, in the same size letters."

Ada looked at the paper, then at the window, at the collection basket on the sill with a couple of envelopes still in it. "That was business between men. Your father was a good worker."

"He was a good worker and a partner, and both of those are printed on page one."

"People signed things back then."

"Then tell me what he signed."

The kitchen clock ticked. Ada's hands had gone still in her lap, and she was looking past Margo at the stove, at the dish, at anything with a handle on it.

"Your father signed, Margo — but he didn't read what he was signing."

Then nothing. Margo gave it room to reconcile.

"Signed what," she said. "A note. A deed. A paper with Walt's hand already on it."

"Don't."

Ada got up and opened the oven, which was off, and stood there with the door down. From the back room Roy laughed again and said somebody's name. Ada's chin came up.

"I've said all of it I'm going to say. You take that paper home."

The kitchen had gone past eighty and the heat came up Margo's back. She stepped onto the rear stoop and stood in the cold until it passed, which took less time than it used to, and used it for her reason to go.

Roy's truck was still at the curb when she pulled away, and the light in the back bedroom had come on.

She parked around on Third, where nobody on the square would have anything to count, and walked the block to Diane's door with the file under her arm.

"I want it in writing," she said.

Diane handed over the legal pad and the pen, the courtesy she extended to clients who had made up their minds. Margo wrote on the top line, dated it, and signed the bottom in the same hand she had used on twenty-four years of timesheets that nobody had ever looked at.

Diane turned the pad around. "The building on Miller Pike. Clear title. In your name alone."

"Not a number. Not a check."

"No liens. No member interests. Nothing with Ackerman Comfort Group anywhere near it." She wrote a note in the margin instead of arguing, and Margo took that for agreement.

"It's what he put in and never got out."

"Then Thursday I'll take it off the table first and let his cash sit there and spoil." Diane set the pad under the corner of the blotter, where she kept what she meant to use. "One more thing. When you hand me a demand that size, I want the reason on paper too."

Margo took the pen back and wrote a fourth line under her name in the square capitals from the payroll sheets: HE DIDN'T READ WHAT HE SIGNED.

Diane read it and did not ask her what she meant, which was an answer of its own.

"Somebody stood over my father with that paper," Margo said. "I want to know who. In the meantime, I'll take the building."

"Thursday, then."

"Thursday."

She put her gloves on and went out, and left the demand on the pad under the corner of the blotter, dated and signed, waiting on the week to come.