Chapter 12: Thirty Days

The lawyer's office was above a shoe repair shop, with a staircase that smelled like polish.

My mother climbed it on Caleb's arm and my own, one step at a time, and refused to stop for breath.

"I'm not dying on a staircase," she said. "I've got standards."

The lawyer was a gray-haired man in shirtsleeves who stood up so fast his chair rolled back into a filing cabinet.

"Donna Marrin," he said. "I have waited three years for you to call."

"I was told to call if the family came for the diner," my mother said. "They didn't come until last week."

"Sit, please. All of you."

He took Frank's card from her hand and read the back of it, and for a moment he couldn't speak.

"Frank came to me two weeks before he died," he said at last. "Gus had sent him."

"Why?"

"Gus wanted it on file that the money was a gift and Frank would never be asked to repay it. Then the stroke came, and then Frank was gone."

I took out my phone and showed him the photograph of the note.

He read it for a long time.

"This is the first I've seen of this," he said. "I never knew a note existed."

He opened a folder and pulled out a photocopy of a white card.

SIGNATURE CARD, FIRST SAVINGS, it said at the top.

At the bottom, in a looped hand with a line under it, was my father's name, signed the day he'd opened the diner's account.

"I copied it for the file," the lawyer said.

He turned to my mother.

"You can ask the bank for the original, Mrs. Marrin, as his widow. The bank will certify it."

"So we can show the signature is wrong," I said.

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