My Nephew Wanted Me to Sign Away the Shed. My Late Husband Had Recorded Our Names in 1994

I did not sign that night. I told Remy I needed to think. He hugged me on the porch, smelling of cigarettes and lime soap, the way he did when he was a boy. Dana hugged me too, a little stiffer, and whispered that she was sorry.

That stayed with me on the drive home along Bayou Teche. The water was still high from the September flood, four feet above where it belonged. Forty families in Catahoula were living in the church hall and the high school gym because their houses had gone under. I had seen trucks go by with mattresses tied to the roofs.

The house was dark when I got home. I made a cup of coffee and sat in the kitchen a long time before I went to the back bedroom, where Ray’s cedar chest stood at the foot of the bed.

Inside, under his good Sunday shirts, was a spiral notebook with a green cover. Ray had kept it for forty years. He wrote down everything: what we paid for lumber, when the propane was delivered, what the crawfish brought at the dock each spring. He had dates for all of it.

I turned the pages slowly. Near the middle, in his careful square hand, I found it. June 14, 1994. Deed recorded, St. Martin Parish Clerk of Court. Book 412, Page 77. Marguerite and Ray Doucet, joint.

My hands shook a little when I set the notebook down. I had not thought about that entry in thirty years. I had been working in the courtroom then, and Ray had handled the papers himself.

The next morning I called Odile Broussard across the bayou. She answered on the first ring, as she always did. She was running the flood-relief sign-up at the church hall and had been up since five.

“Odile, do you remember Ray talking about the papers at the clerk?” I asked.

She was quiet for a second. “He said he had the shed in both your names, cher. He was proud of it. He said, ‘Now Marguerite can never be pushed out by anybody.’ I thought he was being sweet.”

I thanked her and hung up. I did not cry, though I wanted to.

That week I worked at the kitchen table with four spiral notebooks spread around me like a hand of cards. I had numbered them as I filled them and dated each page. I typed my shorthand into clean pages on the old computer Remy had given me for Christmas. I printed the text messages he had sent me since August. One said, plainly, “Aunt Marguerite, the shed was always yours, I know that, don’t make this hard.” I had saved every one.

On Thursday I drove to the Clerk of Court in New Iberia. The building smelled of floor wax and old paper, the same as when I was young. I walked to the counter, where a deputy clerk named Joelle Arceneaux was sorting files.

I told her my name and my husband’s name, and the book and the page. She typed for a while, and her face went careful and polite.

“Give me a minute, Mrs. Doucet,” she said, and disappeared into the back.

When she came back, she held a printed copy of the 1994 deed with a certification stamp at the bottom. She set it on the counter in front of me.

Then she looked up from her screen and said quietly that someone had already requested a copy of Book 412, Page 77 from a Lafayette title company, and that a quitclaim had been pre-filed under Remy Thibodeaux’s name.