The Funeral Money My Brother Moved

I did not know any of that the week he moved the money. I learned most of it afterward, piece by piece, mostly from Brenda, who called me crying three days after that kitchen conversation to tell me she hadn’t known what he’d done until I did, and that she was sick about it.

None of that makes it right. I want to be clear about that too. A man who is drowning does not get to reach into his mother’s funeral money to keep his own head above water and call it borrowing. But I have come to believe that most of the cruelty in families isn’t cold calculation. It’s a scared man convincing himself, in the space of one bad week, that the rules don’t apply to his situation, and then needing somebody he trusts to tell him, gently and firmly, that they still do.

**

I did not call the bank that first night, and I want to explain why, because when I’ve told this part of the story to friends, the first thing out of their mouths is always the same: why didn’t you just call First Dakota and have them fix it.

I did call. The next morning, from my own kitchen in Brookings, before I’d even had coffee. I got Connie Vig on the line, who has worked the teller window at First Dakota for as long as I can remember and who went to high school with me, and I told her what Dennis had told me, and I asked her to move the money back.

Connie was kind about it, but she was also clear in a way that settled into my stomach like a stone. “Peg, I wish I could. His name’s on that account same as your mom’s, has been for over a year. In the bank’s eyes, that’s his money every bit as much as it’s hers. I can’t move a dollar of it without his say so, or without a police report that says it was taken fraudulently, and even then it’d likely take a judge to sort out, because he didn’t forge anything. He’s a legal owner. What he did might be rotten, Peg, but it isn’t the kind of rotten the bank can undo with a form.”

I sat with that for a long minute after I hung up. A police report. I pictured it. I pictured Dennis being questioned by Deputy Haugen, who coaches the same youth wrestling team Dennis’s own boy wrestled on three years back. I pictured it getting into the Weekly Courier, because in a town of eighteen hundred people nothing stays quiet, and I pictured my mother, in whatever clear minutes she had left to her, finding out from a stranger or a headline that her son had been arrested over her funeral money instead of hearing it from me, gently, in a kitchen, the way a family is supposed to settle a thing like this.

And under all of that, if I am honest, there was something else. I was afraid that once that door opened, a police report, a prosecutor, a courtroom, it would never close again, and whatever was left of Dennis and me as brother and sister would go into that account right along with the money, and none of it would come back.