Chapter 6: The Name on the Mailbox
On the fourth day I took two buses to Pell Street.
Fare was two dollars and fifty cents each way. I had eleven dollars and sixty cents when I left the house.
I know the route. My mother worked downtown twenty-two years and I rode it with her from the age of six.
Pell Street is nine blocks long, ends in a cul-de-sac, and has the same eleven maples it had when I was in high school.
Number 31 is the fourth house on the left.
I stood across the street, next to a utility pole, and I did not cross.
The door was different. It had been white with a brass knocker. It was navy now, with a keypad lock.
The porch rail was new. The steps were the same. There is a chip out of the second step from a bicycle in the year I was nine.
The shrubs my mother put in along the front had been pulled and replaced with those round ones that come in bags.
The mailbox on the post at the end of the walk said TOMLIN.
Black vinyl letters, the kind you buy on a card at a hardware store and press on one at a time.
R & K TOMLIN.
I stood there forty minutes. I know because there is a clock on the front of the church at the corner of Pell and Ninth.
Nobody came out for the first thirty-five.
Then a woman came around the side with a recycling bin, set it at the curb, and saw me.
She was maybe forty. She had gardening gloves in her back pocket in March.
“Can I help you,” she said, which in that neighborhood means what are you doing here.
“I used to live here.”
Her face changed. Not to fear. To the other thing, which is embarrassment.
“Oh,” she said. “The Mercers?”
“Mercer,” I said. “Yes.”
“We bought from a Mr. Mercer.” She wiped her hands on nothing. “Two years ago in the fall.”
“Was there anything left in it.”
“Sorry?”
“When you moved in. Boxes. A shoebox, in the hall closet, top shelf.”
She thought about it and she was honest, which I have not forgotten.
“It was empty,” she said. “It was completely empty. They had it professionally cleaned.”
I said thank you and I meant it and I walked back to the bus stop at Pell and Ninth and sat down on the bench.
Then I did the thing I actually knew how to do.
I got on the number 4 instead of the number 12 and rode downtown to the county recorder's office on Halloran Street.
My mother worked in that building. Second floor, land records, twenty-two years, a yellow wall clock over her desk that she brought from home.
The public terminals are in the same room they have always been in. Four of them, two working.
You search by parcel or by name. Copies are one dollar a page. Certified is five.
I searched the parcel for 31 Pell Street.
I printed two pages. It cost two dollars and left me four dollars and sixty cents.
Here is what the record said.
My mother died when I was twenty-two and left the house to me. The deed transferring it into my name alone is recorded in the fall of that year. My name is spelled right.
Then there is a general power of attorney, recorded the following spring.
I signed that.
I want to be very clear about this, because it is mine, and I have never once put it on anybody else.
I signed a general power of attorney eleven days before I stood up in Courtroom 4.
It was three pages. It was explained to me in a hallway by a man with a folder under his arm.
The explanation was that somebody had to pay the property taxes while I was gone, and the alternative was losing the house to the county.
All of that was true. Every word of it was true. That is what makes it work.
I did not read the whole thing. I read the part somebody's finger was on.
The deed out is recorded in the third year of my sentence.
Grantor: Cass Mercer, by Dean Mercer, her attorney in fact.
Grantee: Roland and Kathleen Tomlin, husband and wife.
Consideration: two hundred fourteen thousand dollars.
The signature block has his name, and my name under his hand, and a notary stamp from a bank branch on Delaney, four blocks from where I stood.
I read it twice at the terminal and a third time sitting in a plastic chair by the window.
The house sold for two hundred fourteen thousand dollars while I was on a top bunk two counties away.
There is no line on a deed for where the money goes.
I folded the two pages into thirds, rode two buses back to Anselm Street, and signed the book at 4:41.
Destination column: county recorder.
I still have those two pages. They were the first documents in what eventually became eleven boxes.