The legal work took the better part of two weeks, and it took it the way honest work always takes time: one paper at a time, one signature at a time, one phone call at a time, with nothing rushed and nothing skipped. Attorney Wren came to the house twice, and Karen drove Silas to Wren's office once, and each time the papers were read aloud to him, line by line, in a voice that did not hurry and did not skip the fine print. Silas had spent two years being told what papers said by a woman who benefited from his not knowing, and he was not going to sign another thing in his life without hearing every word of it first. Wren understood that without being told, and she read slowly, and she stopped whenever he raised a hand, and she explained anything he asked about in plain language, twice if he wanted it twice.
The first set of papers revoked Paula's access to everything: the checking account, the house, the mailbox, the small savings account Silas had forgotten he still had. The revocation was total and immediate, and it was entered with the bank and with the county on the same day, so there was no gap in which anyone could slip through. The second set of papers froze the account's history in place — every withdrawal, every signature, every date — so that the record could not be altered or argued away later. Silas listened to both sets with his hands flat on the table, and he asked questions about each one, and Wren answered them, and Karen sat beside him, not answering for him, not even when she knew the answer, because she had learned, the hard way, that answering for her father was the first step down a road she never wanted to walk again.
The third set was the one that mattered most to Silas, because it was the one he chose himself. He had thought about it during the long evenings after Karen went home to Chattanooga, sitting in his kitchen with the talking watch announcing the hours and the westerns playing low on the audio player, and he had made his decisions the way he had always made decisions in his life: slowly, and for himself, and without letting anyone else's urgency set his pace. He wanted Karen as co-signer on the account — not because he could not manage it, but because he wanted his daughter's name on it by his own choice, in the open, with papers read aloud and a lawyer present, instead of a caregiver's name added quietly in a back room. He wanted a caregiver, too, because he was eighty-two and blind and honest about what he could and could not do alone — but he wanted a vetted caregiver from a proper agency, on a proper schedule, with hours he set and duties written down and a supervisor he could call if anything ever felt wrong again. He wanted the mail to come to him, and to be read to him by Karen on Sundays and by the new caregiver on weekdays, and he wanted a rule, written into his own instructions, that no one would ever again answer a question that had been asked of him.
Wren wrote all of it down exactly as he said it. She did not improve it. She did not soften it. She wrote his words, and then she read them back to him, and he listened, and he said that was right, that was what he meant. Then he asked her to read one part a second time — the clause that put Karen's name on the account as co-signer — and Wren read it again, slowly, and Silas listened with his head tilted, the way he listened when something mattered more than the words themselves. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment, and then he said that there was a difference between a name added in secret and a name added in the open, with a lawyer reading it aloud, and that he had lived with the secret kind for two years and he would not live with it again. Karen, sitting beside him, said nothing at all, because there was nothing to add, and because her father saying her name belonged on his account, by his choice, in front of a witness, was the kind of sentence a daughter remembers for the rest of her life. And then they went through the details together, because details were where the last trouble had hidden, and Silas was not going to let it hide there again. The agency schedule would be three days a week, on mornings he chose, and the caregiver's duties would be listed — kitchen, laundry, the rosebush, nothing more, nothing less — and the supervisor's number would be written on a card by the phone, where Silas could reach it by touch. If the caregiver was sick, the agency would send another, and would call first, and would never send anyone unannounced. If anything about the arrangement ever felt wrong, Silas could end it with a single phone call, and no one would need his reason, and no one would argue. Wren read each term aloud, and Silas repeated the important ones back, the way a man repeats an address to make sure he has it right, and Karen wrote them in her own notebook too, so there would be two copies of her father's choices, in two handwritings, in two places.