The Money My Sister Thought I Had

Daddy passed in 2019, quick, the way he would have wanted, out behind the barn with a wrench still in his hand. Mama held up better than any of us expected, which is to say she held up by holding on to Tammy, calling her six times a day, needing her for everything, while I was the one who actually drove out to the home place every evening to make sure she had eaten and taken her pills. That was the shape of it right up until the morning three years ago when I called Mama’s house at seven like I always did and she did not pick up, and I drove out there with my heart in my mouth and found her on the kitchen floor beside the overturned chair.

She had had a stroke in the night.

The doctors in the county seat said it was a bad one but not the worst one. It took the use of her right side and most of her words, though not all of them, and it meant that Eunice Haskell was never going to live alone on that quarter section again. We moved her to Prairie Vista, which is the care home over in the county seat, a clean place, a kind place, with a courtyard where the residents keep tomato plants in five gallon buckets. It is not cheap. Nothing that keeps your mother safe is cheap.

And here is where the money comes into it, so stay with me.

Mama had money. Not a fortune, but more than anybody guessed, because Daddy had been a Merle kind of man himself and the two of them had quietly salted away forty years of wheat checks and the proceeds when they sold the north eighty back in the nineties. There was enough to keep Mama at Prairie Vista for a long time if it was handled right, and there was enough to lose every dime of if it was handled wrong.

Guess which daughter the family put in charge of handling it.

Not Tammy. For all that Mama favored her, even Mama knew that Tammy could not keep a checkbook balanced through a long weekend. Rick had been laid off from the gypsum plant twice, and the two of them lived the way a lot of people live, one truck payment ahead of trouble, always a new four wheeler or a bass boat in the drive and never any idea where the money for it came from. Mama could favor Tammy with her whole heart and still not hand her the bank book. So it fell to me, the steady one, the invisible one, the one nobody worried about, because I was a bookkeeper and because everybody knew Carol would not complain.

I did not complain. But I did do one thing, and that one thing is the whole story.

I went to the bank in the county seat, and I sat down with a woman named Dolores who had helped me and Merle for years, and I set Mama’s money up the way Merle would have set it up. I did not leave it sitting in one big checking account where any wind could blow it away. I arranged for Mama’s care at Prairie Vista to be paid directly out of the savings every month, automatic, so that the thing that mattered most, keeping her roof and her nurses and her tomato buckets, could never be missed and never be touched and never depend on anybody remembering to write a check. Then I kept a small checking account in both our names for the little things, her pharmacy, her hair appointment, the odds and ends, and I kept just enough in it to cover a month at a time. A few thousand dollars, no more. I moved money into it as it drew down, like filling a bird feeder.