The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

The statement

The second Sunday I knocked, Debra said Mom wasn’t feeling up to it. The third Sunday, she said Mom was resting and she’d tell her I came. I left a note tucked in the storm door with the hymn numbers for that morning written on it, so Mom could follow along at home if she wanted.

The note was gone the next Sunday. Nobody ever mentioned it.

In the second week of February, I went over to Mom’s house to run the faucets so the pipes wouldn’t freeze, and I brought in her mail the way I had been doing. Seed catalogs. The light bill. The church newsletter. And a white envelope from the bank downtown.

I am not a person who opens other people’s mail. But I had been paying Mom’s light bill out of my own checkbook for five weeks by then, because nobody else was, and I sat down at her kitchen table and opened it.

Her Social Security came into her checking account on the third Wednesday of every month. Nineteen hundred dollars. It had been coming on that day for nineteen years, ever since Dad passed and she started drawing on his record.

In January, the deposit landed on a Wednesday. By the next Tuesday it was gone. Cash, two hundred dollars at a time, from the machine at the Cenex out on the highway. Groceries at the Hy-Vee in Columbus. And one payment of eleven hundred and forty dollars to the bank in Columbus that holds the loan on Debra’s house.

I knew it was Debra’s mortgage because she had complained about that bank to me at Thanksgiving. How they’d raised her escrow. How the payment had gone up again.

I sat in my mother’s kitchen with the furnace ticking and read the statement three times.

What the rules are

My husband, Tom, has worked at the grain co-op for twenty-six years. He is not a talker. He came in that night, hung his coat on the hook, and found me at our table with the bank statement flat in front of me.

He read it standing up. Then he sat down.

“Did Lois sign something?” he asked. “Making Debra her payee?”

“I don’t think she even knows.”

Tom’s brother had been the payee for their dad after his stroke, so Tom knew how it worked.

If somebody needs help managing their Social Security, you don’t just take the card. You apply to Social Security, they interview you, and you have to keep records and report every year where the money went. It goes into an account for the person, and you spend it on the person.

Debra had done none of that. She had just picked Mom’s debit card up off Mom’s kitchen counter in January and put it in her own purse, PIN number and all, because Mom had written the PIN on a slip of paper in her billfold like half the old people in Nebraska do.

“Say the word,” Tom said, “and I’ll go over there with you. I’ll knock a lot harder than you do.”

I knew what he meant. He did not mean anything rough. He meant he would stand in that doorway, all six foot two of him in his co-op jacket, and he would not move until he saw Lois Bauer with his own eyes.

“I know,” I said. “I know you would.”

“Or call the sheriff. Have a deputy do a welfare check. That’s what they’re for.”

I had thought about that. I had thought about it every night since Pastor Ellen called.