At eleven, Frank cleared his throat. Grant handed the baby back, carefully, and left the giraffe on the windowsill, and went.
Her mother did not come.
She sent a card instead, two days later, to the house. Teresa must have told her. It was a plain white card with no picture on the front, the kind you buy in a box of twenty, and inside, in the slanting hand Nora had watched sign a hundred documents, it said:
I won't ask to see her. I don't have the right. I just want her to know, someday, if you decide she should know about me at all, that her grandmother was a person who made a terrible choice and then, too late, a right one. I hope she gets your stubbornness. I hope she gets your father's hands. I hope she never once in her life feels invisible. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. — D.
Nora read it standing at the kitchen counter with Leona asleep in a sling against her chest. She read it twice. Then she put it in Leo's recipe box, behind the lemonade card, behind the quitclaim and his note. She didn't answer it. She didn't throw it away either. It seemed to her that a life had room in it for things you weren't ready to decide about yet, and that she could keep this one in the box with the others until she was.
* * *
The rest happened the way the end of things happens, slowly and then all at once and then slowly again.
Grant signed a quitclaim deed returning all interest in the property to Nora C. Hollis, a married woman, as her sole and separate property. A stipulated judgment voided the interspousal transfer deed as procured by fraud. The lis pendens was released. The county's fraud alert, which Nora kept, sent her one email in November, cheerful and automated, notifying her that a document had been recorded under her name: the quitclaim. She printed it out and put it in Leo's recipe box, behind the card for the lemonade, next to his note.
Sierra Pacific Bank completed its internal review in October and terminated Grant's employment for unauthorized access to consumer credit data. He moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Natomas. Meyer Lane Holdings was dissolved; the forty-eight thousand dollars, most of which had gone into earnest money and an architect's retainer for the fourplex on Q Street, was largely unrecoverable, and Grant agreed, through counsel, to repay Diane's half of it over five years. Whether he would, nobody knew.
Diane's notary commission was revoked in December. The district attorney charged her with a misdemeanor for failing to keep a proper journal entry and for a false certificate of acknowledgment, and she pleaded no contest and was sentenced to two years' probation and two hundred hours of community service, which she served at a food bank in Rancho Cordova. Golden River Credit Union let her go after nearly thirty years. Teresa said she was working at a home décor store in Folsom, helping people pick out throw pillows and paint colors. Teresa said she was good at it. Teresa said it as if it were both the saddest and the most hopeful thing she'd ever heard.
Grant had stopped returning Diane's calls the week after the settlement conference. Nora heard that from Teresa, too, and did not know what to do with it, so she did nothing.
Frank filed for divorce in November. He did it quietly, with a lawyer in Land Park who'd been in his class at Hiram Johnson in 1981, and he and Diane split everything down the middle without a single argument, which their lawyer said was the most civilized divorce he'd ever seen and Frank said was the first thing they'd agreed on in years. He sold the house in Land Park. He did not sell the boat. He rented a two-bedroom bungalow eight blocks from Nora's, with a detached garage big enough for a sixteen-foot skiff, and he moved the half-finished hull there on a borrowed trailer one Saturday morning in December, with Nora following behind him in her car at fifteen miles an hour, the baby asleep in her car seat in the back, Nora laughing so hard she had to pull over twice.
* * *