The Check With Three Names On It

The bill came by text, four days after we buried her.

I was at Mom’s kitchen table with a shoebox of sympathy cards and a legal pad, writing down who had sent what so I could thank them properly. My phone buzzed against the sugar bowl. It was my brother Doug.

He had typed it up like an invoice.

“Final funeral costs not covered by Mom’s plan,” it said. “Church and fellowship hall, $600. Luncheon for 140, $2,250. Pastor and organist, $300. Flowers, $450. Total $3,600. Split three ways is $1,200 each. Alan and I have already put ours in. Need yours by Friday so I can settle up. Check is fine.”

Then a second text, a minute later.

“Appreciate it, sis.”

I want to be fair to my brothers, because this whole story depends on my being fair to them.

Doug is the oldest. He was 53 that fall, and he sold crop insurance out of an office in Lincoln, an hour and a half up the road. Alan is three years behind him, and he lived in Hastings and ran a forklift at a plant there. I am the caboose. Mom had me at 38, when she thought she was finished, and she used to say I was the Lord’s way of making sure she had company in her old age.

She meant it as a joke. It turned out to be a plan.

Our dad died eleven years ago. Mom did fine on her own for a long time. Then two years back she had a stroke on a Sunday afternoon, and after the stroke her heart started to give out a little at a time, the way an old pump does.

I lived six blocks from her. My husband Jeff and I have a little house on the north side of Hebron, and Mom was in the same white two-story on Lincoln Avenue where the three of us grew up. So it was me. Nobody decided it. It was just a matter of blocks.

I cut my job at the county treasurer’s office down to mornings. I slept in Mom’s spare room four nights a week at first, and then five, and by the last summer it was every night and Jeff was bringing my clean clothes over in a laundry basket.

I learned to crush her pills into applesauce. I learned to change a bed with a person still in it, which the hospice nurse taught me in about four minutes and which I will know how to do until I die.

Doug and Alan called on Sundays. They came at Christmas, and for her birthday in May. They were not bad sons. They were far-off sons, and there is a difference, though I admit that by the end I had to work to remember it.

When she died, on the second Tuesday of October, with the window cracked because she wanted to hear the combines, Doug was at the house by noon.

“You’ve done enough,” he told me, in the front hall, with his hands on my shoulders. “Alan and I will handle the arrangements. You just rest.”

I was so grateful I cried on his jacket.

So they handled the arrangements. Doug sat with the funeral director for an hour. Mom and Dad had bought a prepaid plan years ago, the casket and the vault and the service all paid for, so there was not much to decide. Alan called the cousins. Doug picked the hymns, and got one of them wrong, and I fixed it with Pastor Wayne on the phone without telling him.