The Money My Sister Thought I Had

I did it that way for a reason. I did it because I had watched this family my whole life, and I knew, I knew the way you know a storm by the color of the sky, that someday somebody was going to come looking for Mama’s money. And I wanted the part that mattered to be somewhere nobody could reach it in a bad moment. Not even me. Especially not in a bad moment.

I never told anybody how I had it set up. Why would I. Nobody ever asked me a thing about money in my whole life. I was poor Carol with the co-op job. Who would think to ask me.

Tammy would. That is who.

It started small, the way these things do. At first Tammy was just around more, which I was glad of, because I had been carrying Mama mostly alone and I was tired in a way that sleep does not fix. She would come out to Prairie Vista and sit with Mama, and that was good. But then the questions started.

How much does this place run a month, Carol.

Where is Mama’s money kept, Carol.

Who all is on the accounts, Carol.

I answered her plain the first few times. I told her Mama was taken care of, that the home was paid every month, that there was enough. I did not go into the how of it, because the how of it was Merle’s business and mine and Dolores at the bank, and because something in the way Tammy asked made the hair stand up on my arms. She did not ask the way you ask about your mother. She asked the way you ask about a thing you mean to have.

Then came the day that told me everything.

We were in the parking lot at Prairie Vista, both of us leaving at the same time, and Tammy leaned against her Rick’s shiny new truck and she looked at me over the hood and she said it right out.

I know what you are doing, Carol.

I said I did not know what she meant.

She said, you have been sitting on Mama’s money all these years. You and your little bank job. Everybody thinks you are so poor and so good, but I have done the math. There is thousands in there, and you are the only name on it, and you have been feathering your own nest while I get nothing. Daddy always said that ground would be split even. I know my share is in there somewhere, and I am going to get what is owed to me.

I stood there in that parking lot and I felt forty-four years of being the other kind of day come up my throat all at once.