The Money My Sister Thought I Had

I thanked Reba. I told her I would have it straightened out within the hour, and I did, I moved money across and the blood thinner went through and Mama never missed a pill, because the main payment, the one that mattered, had never been in any danger at all. And then I sat at Merle’s table and I thought about what I was going to do.

I could have called Tammy and screamed. I could have called the law. I had every right to. She had taken a bank card out of a disabled woman’s nightstand and drained an account. But I did not want the law, and I will tell you exactly why. The law would have made it about the four thousand dollars. And this was never about four thousand dollars. This was about forty-four years. This was about a family that had looked at the wrong daughter her whole life and could not see straight, and if I called the sheriff, Tammy would have found a way to make herself the victim of that too. Poor Tammy, hauled in over a misunderstanding by her coldhearted sister.

No. I did not want a warrant. I wanted the family to see. Just once, I wanted them to see.

Mama’s seventy-first birthday was ten days off.

We always did Mama’s birthday at the Hadley First Baptist fellowship hall, the whole family and half the church, sheet cake and the good coffee urn and folding chairs, and after the stroke we had kept it up, wheeling Mama in from Prairie Vista for the afternoon because the outing did her good and because she still lit up at a room full of people even when the words would not come. My brother Donnie was driving in from Amarillo. Rick’s people would be there. The deacons, the ladies from the circle, everybody.

I did not organize an ambush. I want to be clear about that, because I have gone over it a hundred times and I need it to be true. I did not call people and whisper and arrange a reckoning. I just made one decision. I decided that when the family was all together, if it came up, I was not going to protect Tammy anymore. For my whole life I had smoothed things over, filled my plate last, kept the peace by keeping quiet. I had protected everybody from the truth about this family because I thought that was my job, the easy one, the one nobody worries about. I was done.

And it came up. Of course it came up. Because Tammy could not help herself.

We were all in the fellowship hall, Mama in her wheelchair at the head of the long table with a little paper crown the children’s class had made her, happy as I had seen her in months, and the cake was cut, and somewhere in the middle of it Tammy stood up to make a toast. She had a cup of the red punch raised and she was flushed and bright the way she gets when a room is looking at her, and she said something about family and about Mama, and then, because the devil was in her and because she truly believed every word, she turned it on me.