The Morning Mom Took Back Her Checkbook
What Greg said in October
It came out of her slowly, the way things come out of a woman who has been embarrassed and has not told anyone.
Greg had come by in early October on a Tuesday afternoon. He is 57 and sells insurance in a town about fifteen miles the other direction. He has his own little agency, his name on the window, two people working for him.
He came by more that fall than he usually did, Mom said. Twice in September. She thought it was sweet. She thought he was finally slowing down enough to visit his mother.
That Tuesday he sat at this same table and asked if she had paid her electric bill. She said yes. He asked her when. She could not remember the date right off, and he said, kindly, “See, Mom, that’s what I’m worried about.”
She had paid it. She showed me. It was in the green notebook, September 14th, $88.40, in her own writing. She just could not pull the date out of the air when he asked.
Then he told her about the scammers. How they call old widows and pretend to be the grandkids, or the bank, or the government. How it happens every day.
“He said they go after widows,” Mom told me. “He said it was safer if he was on there too, so he could watch for anything strange. He said it was just a precaution. He said you’d agree.”
“He said I would agree,” I repeated.
“He said not to bother you with it. He said you had enough on your plate with the office.” She looked up at me. “Did he talk to you, Linda? I thought he talked to you.”
He had not. Not a word. Not in October, not at Thanksgiving when we all sat around this table and he carved the turkey, and not at Christmas when he handed Mom a scented candle and kissed her on the cheek.
So he had driven her to the bank the week after that Tuesday. She had signed something. She did not remember exactly what. She remembered that Karen had done the paperwork and had asked her a few questions, and that Greg had answered most of them for her.
Then Mom folded her hands on the oilcloth. She looked at the statement and then at me, and she asked the question that I will hear for the rest of my life.
“Am I confused, Linda?”
That was the part that broke me. Not the $9,000. Not the bounced check or the thirty dollars. It was that my brother had made our mother sit at her own kitchen table and wonder if her mind was going.