The Checkbook on Grandma’s Kitchen Table

Grandma bought her checks four pads at a time and kept the spare pads in the bottom of her desk drawer, under the Christmas card list.

Everyone in the family knew that. So did anyone who had helped her find a stamp.

“How did you catch it?” I asked. My voice did not sound like mine.

Marcy folded her hands. “The first ones were deposited at a bank in Oelwein, so I never saw them. But the last three, Sandy cashed right at my window. The third time, it bothered me all weekend.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because my dad used the same home care agency before he passed,” she said. “The agency bills the family. The family doesn’t pay the aide. Nobody writes the aide a personal check every two weeks. So Monday morning I pulled the history and laid them out next to the card. I should have stopped it at the window, Brooke. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “You called me.”

“You’re on the account,” she said. “So it’s your call what happens next, yours and your grandma’s. But I can put a stop on the rest of that back pad right now, so nothing else clears.”

“Do it,” I said. “All of them.”

She typed in the range, thirteen ninety-seven through fourteen twenty, and printed me a slip. Sixteen checks.

Nine thousand six hundred dollars. I sat there and did the math twice, the way I make my kids check their subtraction.

My husband, Nate, is a service tech at the implement dealer on the highway. I called him from the bank parking lot with the engine running and the heater roaring.

He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which is one of the reasons I married him.

“Call the sheriff, Brooke,” he said. “That’s what the sheriff is for. That’s somebody stealing from a ninety-one-year-old woman.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m going to. I want to see Grandma first.”

“Then go see her,” he said. “I’ll meet you out there when I’m off.”

I drove the four miles north faster than I should have on a gravel road in February. I kept seeing things I did not want to see.

Grandma at the bottom of the basement stairs. Grandma confused and scared. Grandma alone in the house with someone who had been lying to her face five mornings a week.

The lane was plowed. The yard light was already on in the gray afternoon. I went in through the back porch, the way family always does, and stomped my boots on the rag rug.

She was at the kitchen table with the farm report on the radio and a crossword folded into quarters. She looked up over her glasses. “Well,” she said. “It’s a Thursday. Who died?”

“Nobody, Grandma,” I said, and I went over and put my arms around her, and held on long enough that she patted my back and said, “All right now. All right.”

I did what I could not help doing. I opened the refrigerator and it was full. I checked her pill organizer on the windowsill and Thursday was empty and Friday was right.

Her hair was washed. Her slippers were by the register. Nothing was wrong anywhere I could see.

On the second shelf of the refrigerator was a casserole dish covered in foil. On the foil was a strip of masking tape, and on the tape, in blue ballpoint, it said: 350 for 40 min, Evelyn. Not the microwave, it gets rubbery.