Chapter 10: Attorney Ellen Cho
The legal aid office was in a converted house on the edge of downtown Cedar Bluff, with a porch that sagged a little and a sign by the door that said walk-ins welcome on Tuesdays. I had called on a Monday and been given ten o'clock on Wednesday, and I spent the two days in between carrying the biscuit tin around the house like it might evaporate if I set it down.
Margaret watched me from her chair by the kitchen window. "You look like you're guarding the crown jewels," she said.
"I suppose I am," I said. "These are your crown jewels, Mom."
She smiled, but it was a tired smile. Mark had been quiet since the night I asked about the papers — not apologetic, just watchful, the way a man watches when he knows someone has started counting his cards. Tina had taken to making tea whenever I came into the kitchen, as if hot water could fill the silence. Josh had started eating dinner in his room.
On Wednesday morning I drove to the legal aid office with the tin on the passenger seat, belted in like a child. The waiting room smelled like old coffee and paper. A woman came out to meet me who did not look like what I had expected a lawyer to look like — no suit, no briefcase, just a cardigan and a calm face and eyes that went straight to the tin.
"I'm Ellen Cho," she said. "Come on back."
Her office was small and crowded with files, and she cleared a space on her desk for the tin. I laid out the contents the way I had laid them out on Margaret's kitchen table: the copy of the original deed, the closing statement, my wire transfer records, and my mother's handwritten note from the week after her surgery.
Ellen read everything without hurrying. She read the deed twice. She held my mother's note up to the light as if the paper itself might tell her something, and then she set it down gently.
"Tell me about the surgery," she said.
I told her. Eighteen months ago, Margaret's hip. Six weeks of recovery. Strong pain medication — the kind that had left my mother groggy and confused, sleeping at odd hours, asking the same question twice. I told her about Eleanor seeing Mark bring the papers on one of those groggy days. I told her about my mother asking Eleanor the next week what she had signed.
"And the quitclaim is recorded?" Ellen asked.
"Mark says so. He says the house is his."
Ellen nodded slowly. "Here's my plain assessment, Diane. A quitclaim deed signed by a seventy-one-year-old woman six weeks after major surgery, while she was on strong pain medication, without independent advice, transferring her home to the son who brought the papers and called them insurance paperwork — that has the shape of undue influence. And your paper trail is excellent. The purchase money came from you. The deed was in her name for years. The note in her own handwriting, dated a week after the surgery, saying she doesn't remember signing anything about the house — that's the kind of thing that makes the other side's lawyer go quiet."
I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't known was tight. "So we can get it back?"
"We have a strong case for rescission," Ellen said. "But I want to be honest with you about what that means. We start with a demand letter. We lay out the facts, we attach the records, and we ask him to agree to rescind the deed. Most of these cases never see a courtroom, because the paper trail does the talking. If he refuses, then we talk about next steps. But my goal — and I think it should be your mother's goal — is to resolve this without a lawsuit. Lawsuits take years. Your mother is seventy-one. Time is the one thing we can't get back."
"How much do you charge?" I asked. It felt crude, but I had learned in Singapore that the money question asked early saves everyone embarrassment later.
"A modest fixed fee," Ellen said, and named a figure that was less than one month of my Singapore rent. "Legal aid rates. Your mother qualifies, and frankly, I'd take this case at any rate. I don't like what I see in this file."
I almost cried. I didn't — I had spent six years learning to be composed in rooms where composure was currency — but I wanted to.
"One more thing," Ellen said. "I need to meet your mother. Not to interrogate her. Just to hear, in her own words, what happened. And I need her permission to act for her. This is her case, Diane, not yours. That's important — legally, and in every other way."