Chapter 4: The Lawyer on Clement Street
The lawyer's name was Paul Okafor.
His office was exactly where Mom said it would be — a narrow building between a dry cleaner and a Vietnamese bakery, four blocks from where the Deerfield Road shelter used to stand before the city tore it down in 2009.
We called from the car.
He answered on the second ring.
"Mr.
Okafor, my name is Margaret Ellison.
I was told you've been looking for me."
A pause.
Then: "Mrs.
Ellison.
I've been waiting three years for this call."
He asked us to come in that afternoon.
Mom didn't hesitate.
His office was small and orderly.
Framed certificates on the wall, a desk with almost nothing on it, two chairs across from him that looked like they'd been placed there deliberately — like he'd been expecting exactly two people.
He stood when we walked in.
He was maybe sixty, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the careful, measured manner of a man who had delivered difficult news many times and learned how to do it gently.
"Mrs.
Ellison," he said.
"Please, sit."
Mom sat.
I sat beside her.
He opened a folder on his desk.
"Walter Greer was my client for eleven years," he said.
"He came to me first in 2012.
He had recently sold a property — a commercial building he'd owned since the 1990s.
He wanted to put his affairs in order."
"I didn't know Walter owned property," Mom said.
"Most people didn't.
He lived simply.
By choice." Okafor folded his hands.
"He told me about the shelter.
About the winter of 1993.
He said there was a woman — a volunteer — who came every single day from November through February.
He said she brought food she'd made herself.
He said she remembered everyone's name.
He said she sat with him the night he decided he didn't want to be alive anymore, and she talked with him until morning."
Mom was very still.
"He said he never told her what that night meant to him," Okafor continued.
"He said he was too ashamed.
And then the shelter closed for renovations and he lost track of her, and by the time he thought to look, years had passed."
"I moved twice," Mom said quietly.
"After your father died," she added, glancing at me.
"He found that out eventually.
His investigator traced you as far as the second address, then lost the trail." Okafor looked at her steadily.
"He never stopped looking.
He just ran out of time."
I watched Mom's face.
She wasn't crying.
She was doing something harder than crying — she was holding very still while something large moved through her.
"What did he leave her?" I asked.
Okafor reached into the folder.
He slid a document across the desk.
Mom picked it up.
I leaned in to read it with her.
The number at the bottom of the page made me sit back in my chair.
"That can't be right," I said.
"It is," Okafor said.
"That's—" I looked at him.
"That's his entire estate."
"The building sold for considerably more than he expected.
He had no heirs.
No spouse, no children.
He had one person he wanted to find." Okafor looked at Mom.
"He wrote in his instructions that if you couldn't be located within ten years of his death, the funds were to go to a shelter foundation.
But you were found." He paused.
"You were always going to be found.
He made sure of that."
Mom set the document down on the desk.
"I can't accept this," she said.
"Mom—"
"I was just doing what anyone would do."
"Mrs.
Ellison," Okafor said, and his voice was very quiet, "Walter knew you would say that.
He wrote it down.
He said — and I'm reading his exact words here — he said, 'She will tell you she was just doing what anyone would do.
Tell her that no one else did.'"
The room was silent.
Mom looked at the document again.
Her hand moved to the edge of the desk and stayed there.
Outside, I could hear the bakery next door, the faint sound of something being set on a metal tray.
"He said one more thing," Okafor said.
Mom looked up.
"He said, 'Tell her the green scarf is with the letter.
I want her to have it back.'"
Mom's hand gripped the edge of the desk.
"Back?" I said.
"What does he mean, back?"
Okafor opened the bottom drawer of his desk and lifted out a folded square of green wool.
Mom made a sound I had never heard from her before.
"I gave him that scarf," she whispered.
"The night I sat with him.
He was so cold.
I took it off and put it around his shoulders and I told him to keep it." She looked at it.
"I told him it would keep him warm until spring."
May you like
Okafor set it on the desk between them.
"He kept it for thirty-one years," he said.
