The Bank Records That Exposed My Father

I was the one who took her to Macon for chemo. Every other Tuesday for the better part of a year, I drove her two hours each way to the cancer center, sat with her through the infusions, brought her home, and put her to bed before driving myself back to my own house to start the whole week over again. I kept my job at the co-op through all of it because we needed the income and because Momma, even sick, would have been furious if I’d quit on her account. My brother Rich lives in Waycross, forty five minutes away, and works rotating shifts at a plant that made it easy for him to say he couldn’t get free. My sister Shelly lives fifteen minutes from the farm, married to a mechanic named Chris, with two kids of her own, and somehow always had a reason those two kids needed her more than Momma did.

I am not telling you this to make myself sound like a saint. I made mistakes that year too. I snapped at nurses. I forgot to eat some days until nine at night. I let my own small savings dwindle down to almost nothing covering copays and gas and the extra medication Momma’s insurance wouldn’t touch, because every time I asked my father for help he told me the account was tight that month, and I believed him, because why would a man lie about money to the daughter driving his dying wife to chemo.

I am telling you all of this because you need to understand what “always a servant” actually cost, and who actually paid for the eleven months it took the cancer to finish her. It cost me two years of my own life I will never get back a second time. It cost me a boyfriend at the time who got tired of coming in second to a hospital schedule and left before Momma even passed. It cost me sleep I still have not fully recovered, the particular exhaustion of being the only person in a family who treats an emergency like an emergency instead of an inconvenience that will sort itself out if you wait long enough for someone else to handle it.

What Momma Left Behind

Somewhere in that last year, Momma started an account. She never made a show of it. She would slip twenty dollars from selling eggs into it, or forty from a quilt she’d sold at the church bazaar, and by the time she died she had built it up to just over twelve thousand dollars. She put my name on it, not my father’s, not my siblings’. When she told me about it, near the end, she said something I have turned over in my head every day since.

“This is for you, Colleen,” she said. “Not because I love you more. Because you’re the one who’ll need it, and you’re the one nobody else will think to give it to.”

She was right on both counts, though I didn’t know how right until the week after Thanksgiving.

For nearly a year after she passed, that account sat quietly, doing nothing but existing, the way a lot of grief does. My father never mentioned it in front of my siblings. I assumed that was because he respected Momma’s wishes, or maybe because he’d simply forgotten. I have since learned that my father does not forget things that involve money. He waits.