Then he added, with the careful tone of a man choosing words to avoid liability, “The woman who contacted me described herself as managing the property on behalf of the family. She said she was the owner’s mother.”
He paused.
“I just want to confirm that you’re aware of who I was dealing with.”
“I’m aware,” I said.
“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry for the intrusion.”
“You were doing your job,” I said. “Thank you for calling me directly.”
We ended the call.
I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment and then set it face down on the desk.
Through the window across from me, a city bus moved slowly down the street outside the office building. Its route number lit in orange above the windshield. A woman at the bus stop gathered her bag and stood. Two people got off. The bus moved on.
None of them knew what had just happened in this room.
None of them needed to.
I turned back to my desk and opened the email program.
The title search report from Leon Bassett arrived at 3:14 that afternoon.
It was thirty-one pages.
I read all of them.
The listing agreement my mother had signed was on page twenty-two.
She had written her name in the signature line designated for the property owner. And in the field for relationship to owner, she had written family representative.
Beneath the signature, in the field that asked for the basis of authority, she had written the word family again and nothing else.
The listing price she had agreed to was 340,000.
I had purchased the property for 312,000 four years earlier.
In the current market, comparable properties on my street were selling at $375,000 to $390,000.
She had priced it to move quickly, eighteen thousand dollars below what I could reasonably expect to receive.
I looked at that number for a long time.
I understood, looking at it, that my mother had not thought carefully about what the number meant.
She had thought about the speed.
She had thought about the amount being sufficient for whatever she needed it to do.
She had not thought about it from my side of the transaction, because she did not think of it as a transaction I was party to.
In her understanding of the situation, she was managing something, not taking something.
This distinction mattered to her enormously and was entirely invisible to me.
It had always been like this, I thought.
She had loved me in ways that required my compliance, but not my consent.
She had decided what I needed and provided it, or decided I was fine and gave what she had to someone else. She had never once, as far as I could remember, asked me what I wanted and then waited for the answer, and then done that specific thing without modification.
This was not cruelty. I want to be precise about that.
It was not cruelty.
It was something more ordinary, and in some ways more difficult to name.
A habit of looking at the people in her care and seeing her own assessment of them instead of the people themselves.
Forty-seven dollars short of glasses.
Fine. She doesn’t complain.
Three hundred forty thousand for a house worth more. Moving fast.
She won’t know.
I saved the title report to my folder.
Then I opened a new browser tab and navigated to the Wake County Register of Deeds public portal and confirmed, for my own records, that every instrument I had filed was still in place and exactly as I had recorded it.
They were.
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