Chapter 24 of 24Both Lines Are Yours

The deed ran four pages and the line that mattered was on the third one — Grantor, Roy Ackerman, in his hurry-up scrawl, and under it a blank for Grantee. Roy had until year-end to clear the SBA note and get the payoff and release recorded, and if he missed it the eleven acres on Miller Pike went straight back into the lawsuit and the lawsuit went back in front of a magistrate.

So on the Saturday before Christmas, in Corley, Margaret Ackerman signed her father's land into her own name alone, on the client side of Diane Halloran's desk, two doors north of the courthouse steps, with a ballpoint she had carried over from the house on Sixth Street. She was not going to sign her father's ground with a pen that belonged to somebody else.

Diane turned the page with one knuckle and slid it back across the desk.

"Read the grantee line out loud."

"Margaret Ackerman."

"Read the rest of it."

"Grantee, Margaret Ackerman, a married person." Margo set the pen down. "Both lines are mine."

"Grantor and grantee. That's what a deed is." Diane capped her own pen and laid it in the tray, which was how a person learned to read her. "The sentiment, save it for the sidewalk."

"It's the first paper I've signed as just me since I started keeping his books."

"It isn't. You've signed plenty. This is the first one where you read the top of it before you signed." Diane squared the copies and moved the butterscotch dish into reach. Margo left it alone. "Now the whole sentence. He has until year-end to clear that note and record the release. If he doesn't, this deed is a photograph of an idea. You'll own half a mortgage and the other half of a fight."

"Then he'll clear it. There isn't another door in the room."

"There's one. He pays it, or he finds a lawyer who costs more than I do and starts the whole thing over."

"Well."

Diane handed the original across and held on until Margo had both hands on it. "Walk it over yourself. Ninety seconds. A woman ought to walk her own deed across."

The first-floor hall of the courthouse smelled of dust cooking off the boiler and somebody's popcorn. The recorder's window sits across the hall from the clerk of courts, and the deputy there took the deed, stamped it, read the legal description back off the page without looking up — eleven acres, Miller Pike, the old Sczepanski parcel — and asked if she wanted copies.

"Two certified."

"Eight dollars."

She paid out of the folded cash in her purse. He handed the original back with a date in blue ink across the top corner that had not been there when she walked in. Outside, the snow came down slow through the courthouse lights, the limbs the ice storm had taken down along Miller Pike were stacked and chipped at the curb, and the square was filling in for the Walk — luminarias down all four sidewalks and the high-school band mangling two carols by the war memorial.

The truck was in the shop yard seven minutes later, over on Miller Pike. The front office had a new lock, a lease Margo had typed herself, and no drawer in it with ones in it. Nick's truck sat at the door and Gil's behind it, both of them back off the Fishers' place out on the county line with their boots wet to the ankle.

Gil carried the toolbox down from the loft with the moving blanket still on it.

"You want it on a wall?"

"There."

Margo pointed at the stud line above the parts counter. "Wherever the person behind that counter has to look at it."

He held the level while she set the screws. The lid had initials punched into the metal, E. J. S., done with a nail and a hammer by a man who never in his life bought a letter punch.

"Your dad's."

"His hands built it." She got the last screw seated and stepped back with the screwdriver in her fist. "This building has his name on it again, and the whole town took a season to notice that the sign never said anything else."

Gil wiped his hands down his coat. "I've got four years left on the board and I'd like to run them out with no drawer in this office."

"That's the lease, not a favor."

"Then it's the first lease I've ever read."

She drove back to the square and got the last stool at Carol's counter. Every booth was full. Deb came in behind her with her coat still on and a Kroger bag crackling against her side.

Carol had the cups down before Deb's coat was off. "You'll want the special."

"She does not want the special." Deb put a pint of Graeter's on the counter, black raspberry chip, six ninety-nine. "Give me spoons for everybody and don't give me a speech about it."

"It's the Walk. I allow it." Carol slid the spoons across and went back to the cocoa urn. "Any other Saturday I'd charge you a plate fee."

Nick came in with snow on his shoulders. "Gil's got me on first call through the holiday."

"I saw the board."

"I'm sitting for my own license in the spring. My own card, my own number."

Margo turned the fan over in her hand. "Good."

"And the girl?"

"Off the state filing. The condo's empty."

"What'd he keep, then?"

"A company with no buyer and a bill from the Internal Revenue Service."

"Twenty-four years of bookkeeping and that's the estate." Deb got the lid off the pint. "A mailbox with his name on it."

"It's what he asked for."

Steph had come in Wednesday and parked in Gil's spot twice before anybody told her whose it was. She took the stool on the other side.

"Mom, I want to see it."

Margo took the certified copy out of her purse, folded once, and set it on the counter between the spoons.

Steph read the grantee line aloud, moving her lips. "Your name's the only one on it."

"There's a line under it that says a married person."

"You're going to be that about this."

"I'm going to be exactly that about this."

"I told Dad I'd see him after New Year's." Steph picked up a spoon. "I don't know if I will."

"You don't have to know tonight."

"I already know. I don't want to say it in front of Carol."

From the window at the end of the counter she could see the whole square — the courthouse strung and lit, the luminaria lines running down all four sidewalks to the corners. Ada Ackerman stood on the north walk by the St. Boniface crowd with her collar turned up and her rosary in her fist, watching the choir get itself organized. She found Margo through the glass and nodded once. Then she turned her face away and went off toward Sixth Street.

Margo opened her coat and fanned herself while the snow came down past the window in the coldest week of the year.

Ada had gotten one whole sentence out on Monday and stopped. Your father signed, Margo — but he didn't read what he was signing. Somebody drew that buyout up for a tired man in a bad year and put a pen in his hand, and the note under it has been sitting in the recorder's index across the square with no release beside it ever since.

The deed in her purse had her name alone on it. The note had her father's name on it, and no satisfaction, and nobody in that town had ever once asked why. So who drew the buyout up, who took the shop and the sign and the ground out from under him, and if that note was never paid — whose hand was it in now, and was it still hers to collect?