The Funeral Money My Brother Moved
I want to back up and tell this the right way, because a story like this doesn’t make sense if you don’t understand how we got to that kitchen in the first place.
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Our mother is seventy eight. She raised Dennis and me on a half section outside of town that our dad farmed until his heart gave out when I was thirty one, and after that she sold the machinery and most of the land but kept the house in town that she and Dad had bought for their retirement, the white one on Vold Street with the covered porch and the lilac bush that never did well because it got too much wind.
Two years ago the forgetting started. Small things at first, the kind every family tells itself is normal. She’d call me twice in one afternoon and not remember the first call. She put the car keys in the freezer once and laughed about it for a week. Then it stopped being funny. She left a burner on under an empty pan and the smoke alarm woke the Hendersons two doors down. She got turned around in her own alley and a neighbor boy walked her home.
By September her doctor in Sioux Falls was using the word that nobody in our family wanted to say out loud at the kitchen table, and by November we knew Prairie Crossing, the nursing home out on the highway, was where she needed to be, where there would be people watching her at three in the morning, which neither Dennis nor I could do and still keep our own jobs and marriages standing.
Somewhere in that same stretch, maybe a year and a half back, Mom had asked Dennis to go to First Dakota Bank with her and put his name on her checking and savings as a joint owner, so he could help her pay the propane bill and the taxes once her handwriting on checks got shaky. That part made sense. She trusted him with the bills because he lived fifteen minutes away and I lived fifty five, over in Brookings, and because, if I am honest, some piece of her wanted to prove to herself and to the town that her son had come through for her, after some rough years where he hadn’t.
What she did not plan on, what none of us planned on, was that being a joint owner on a bank account does not mean you are a trustee watching over somebody else’s money. It means the bank treats you as if the money is yours too, free and clear, the day your name goes on that signature card. I did not understand that distinction myself until I had to learn it the hard way, standing at a counter at First Dakota two days after that kitchen conversation, which I will get to.