The Coffee Can My Aunt Took
“Because I kept thinking she’d bring it back on her own, and I didn’t want to make it a thing between you two before I gave her the chance.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s been five weeks and I’m tired of waiting on my own daughter to do right.”
I want to explain, because it matters, why neither one of us picked up a phone and called the sheriff’s department, which is the first thing most people would say we should have done, and which my husband Mark said almost word for word when I told him that night.
“Call the law,” Mark said. “Tell them your aunt stole two thousand dollars from an eighty seven year old woman. That’s elder exploitation, Robin, that’s a real charge.”
“It’s cash with no paper on it, Mark. No receipt, no bank record, no will, nothing but Mabel’s word that the can ever had that much in it. It would be her word against Carol’s, and even if a deputy believed every bit of it, you want to know what that call does? It makes my grandmother the woman who had her own daughter arrested. She would have to live in this county, in that church, for the rest of her life, as that woman. She would rather lose the money.”
“Then what, we just let Carol keep it?”
“No. But it’s not going to be a badge that gets it back. It’s going to be Carol’s own conscience, in front of people who’d be ashamed for her if she doesn’t have any shame of her own left.”
Mark didn’t love that answer. He is a good man, my husband, nineteen years now, and he drives a propane truck six days a week and comes home smelling like diesel and wanting to fix things with his hands, the way he fixes a frozen regulator or a cracked line, straightforward and done. He wanted to drive to Carol’s house himself and stand in her kitchen and ask her man to man where the money was. I told him no, and I want to be fair to him here, because he heard that no and he did not argue it twice. He said, “All right. But if she gives you one ounce of trouble, you call me, and I’ll be there before you hang up the phone.” That was enough for me. Some things are not a man’s to fix, and Mark, to his credit, knew which kind this was.