Chapter 45: Memorandum
The first thing I did was not think about it.
The first thing I did was write it down.
There is a form of document called a memorandum to file.
Nobody signs it. Nobody serves it. It exists so that a fact has a place to live.
I took a sheet of the office letterhead, turned it over, and used the back, because I was not going to put a personal note on Marisol's paper the right way up.
MEMORANDUM TO FILE. Then the date.
Then the time, 7:56 to 8:11.
Present: C. Mercer. D. Mercer.
Relationship: former spouse. I wrote former spouse, because that is what the decree calls him.
Location: Vega Bail Bonds, front counter, front door unlocked at 7:54.
Document presented: two pages, stapled, titled Waiver and Release of Marital Property Claims and Quitclaim. Firm name in the corner.
No cover letter. No enclosure list. No self-addressed envelope.
I underlined that last part twice, and I will come back to it.
Then I wrote what he said, in quotation marks where I was certain and in paraphrase where I was not, and I marked which was which.
Then what I said.
Then the hand on the document and what I did about it, in one flat sentence.
Then the time he left and the direction he went and the vehicle, with the registration, which I could read from the window.
It took eleven minutes.
Then I signed it and dated it, which is not required, and did it anyway.
At 8:40 the phone started and I did not think about it again until eleven. Nine calls before ten. Two of them the same woman.
Marisol came back from the courthouse at eleven-oh-five with a coffee and a face that meant the hearing had gone the way she wanted.
She saw the two pages on the desk.
She reads upside down, which every good clerk does.
She said, “Whose is that?”
I said, “Mine.”
She put the coffee down and picked it up and read it in about ninety seconds, standing.
Then she put it back down and said, “Who brought it?”
I said, “My ex-husband. At five to eight.”
She said, “Before I got in.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “That's not an accident.”
I said, “No.”
Then she asked the question that turned out to be the only question, and she asked it the way she asks everything, which is without any decoration.
She said, “What does he get if you sign?”
I said, “Clean title. The bank wants it for the refinance.”
She said, “That's what he told you.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “So what does he actually get?”
I opened my mouth and found that I did not know. I stood there with my mouth open for about a second and a half.
I had read the document twice and I could recite the operative clause and I did not know what it was for.
That is a specific kind of failure and I recognised it immediately, because it is the failure I catch at this desk forty times a month.
You can read every word of an instrument and still not know what it does, if you do not know what came before it.
Marisol said, “Then that's what you find out.”
She said, “Don't sign anything with a blank notary block. Somebody's paying that notary and it isn't you.”
Then she took her coffee into the front room and put the radio on, four hours early, which she did about twice a year.
I sat and looked at the two pages.
Here is the thing about the missing envelope.
When a firm sends a document out for execution, they send a cover letter, and an enclosure list, and a prepaid return envelope, because they want it back and they want proof of when it went out.
There was none of that.
There was a folder with a lawyer's name on it and a man in a supplier's jacket at five to eight in the morning.
That does not mean anything on its own. Documents get hand-carried. People save postage.
I want to be careful here, because it would be very easy to write this so that I looked clever on that Tuesday, and I was not clever on that Tuesday.
I noticed an absence. That is all.
It is the same skill as noticing that a photograph log lists sixty-one images and the file contains none.
I put the waiver in the back of the composition notebook, behind the denial letter and Ivry's carbon and the copy of my criminal history.
Four documents now. All of them about what I was allowed to have.
Then I did four hundred and ten pages before four-thirty, and I did not make a single error, because that is what my hands do when the rest of me is busy.