Part 5

Twenty-seven years later. And now I had a photo stamped SEP 67 and a note in my grandfather's handwriting dated October 14, 1967, buried in the concrete. Then I found the last piece. Texas law says a homeowners association can't foreclose on your house when all you owe is fines, and lawyer fees that came from those fines. That was every dollar of my grandmother's eleven thousand and fifty. The foreclosure notice taped to her door was a bluff. Chad Sizemore could never legally take her house over that pole. He'd been counting on an old woman not knowing that. Then I looked up Lone Oak Land Partners on the Texas Secretary of State's website. Any company in Texas has to register there, and the records are public. It cost me a dollar. The managing member of Lone Oak Land Partners was Chad Sizemore. The man fining my grandmother fifty dollars a day was the same man offering to buy her house for a quarter of what it was worth. On Sunday afternoon, my grandmother baked a pecan pie, and the two of us walked up and down Stonebridge knocking on doors. She knows everybody. Half the people on that street learned to ride bikes on her road. At the corner of Bluebonnet and Main, Mrs. Delphine Dolan, seventy-seven, a widow, opened her door and started crying when she saw us. She pulled two envelopes out of a kitchen drawer. A fine for her late husband's backyard workshop, "never approved." And a cream-colored offer from Lone Oak Land Partners. Two doors down, Mrs. Eunice Kettering, eighty, had the same two envelopes. Her fine was for a carport her son built in 1991. And Mrs. Mabel Hutchins, seventy-nine, wasn't home anymore. Her neighbor told us she'd sold her house in August for eighty-eight thousand dollars and moved into an assisted living place in Temple. She'd been too scared to fight. Four widows. All over seventy-five. All on big lots at the edges of the neighborhood. All fined, and then all offered cash by the same company. Walking home, my grandmother held my arm tighter than usual. "Mabel's husband was in Korea," she said quietly. "She baked for every funeral in this town for forty years. And that man took her house for eighty-eight thousand dollars." I'd never heard my grandmother sound like that. Not sad. Furious. It was the first time I realized where I get it from. That night, after she went to bed, I picked up Chad's offer letter one more time. I'd only skimmed the second page before. I read it slowly now. Near the bottom, above Chad's signature, there was a line I had missed. "Your son has told us he agrees this is the best option for you, and he is ready to help with the move." My father. Mitch Kimbrough. Grandpa Jimmy's son. The baby in that photograph. I sat at that kitchen table and felt like someone had kicked me in the chest. I asked my father to come to Grandma's house for supper.