The Lavender Dress Went to the Party

The deposit slip said $200.41. I stood at the counter at Farmers State Bank with my mother’s hundred dollar check already gone into the drawer, and I read that number three times. Kim, the teller, did not look up. She was straightening a stack of envelopes that did not need straightening.

“Kim,” I said. “That’s the balance? After today?”

“That’s what it shows, Janet.”

“There’s supposed to be nine thousand dollars in that account.”

Kim set the envelopes down. She had worked that window for twenty years, and she had sold me stamps a thousand times when I was on the other side of the post office counter across the street. She knew my mother. She knew my brother. She knew exactly what she could and could not say.

“I can’t go over the account with you,” she said quietly. “You’re not on it. But you might want to bring your mom in.”

I folded the slip in half and put it in my purse, and I walked out into the June sun like someone had hit me with a door.

The account

Let me back up, because you need to know what that money was.

My mother, Evelyn Holm, was eighty-six that spring. She still lived in her own house on Third Avenue, three blocks from the Lutheran church, with a heart that her cardiologist in Watertown called “tired but stubborn.”

She took her pills, she did her crossword in pen, and she could still tell you the price of a pound of coffee in 1971.

In 2017 she sat down with Mr. Lund at Lund Funeral Home and planned her own funeral. All of it. The hymns, the casket, the lunch in the church basement afterward. She picked the scalloped potatoes over the cheesy ones, because she said the cheesy ones got gluey if they sat.

She put a deposit down with Mr. Lund. The rest, she said, would come from her own savings when the time came. She did not want her children paying for her to be buried. She had watched what that did to families.

So she opened a savings account at Farmers State, just for that. She put in what she could, and then a hundred dollars a month from her Social Security, every month, for years. By the spring I am telling you about, it had reached nine thousand dollars.

She was proud of that number. She said it out loud sometimes, the way other women talk about grandchildren. Usually Dennis ran her check down to the bank. That June he said he was swamped at the dealership, so she handed it to me.

After her heart scare in 2019, when she spent four days in the hospital in Watertown, the bank suggested she put a second name on the account. Joint owner, for convenience, in case she was laid up and a bill needed paying. She chose my brother Dennis.

I was not hurt by that. Dennis lived in town, ran his own business, and knew his way around a bank. I lived twenty minutes out on a gravel road and I had been divorced since 1998. Mom figured the man with the business should hold the purse strings. That was how she was raised.

What it meant, though, was that Dennis could walk into Farmers State any day of the week and take out every dollar, and it would be perfectly legal. Joint owners can do that. It is not a payable-on-death account where the money waits. It was his to take, the same as it was hers.

Every Sunday after church, at dinner, Mom asked him the same thing. “Is my funeral money still behaving, Dennis?” And every Sunday, my brother said, “Right where you left it, Mom.”