The Morning Mom Took Back Her Checkbook

Why I did not pick up the phone

I went out on the back step at ten o’clock to call Pete, because I did not want Mom to hear me. The stars were out hard and white over the elevator.

I told him all of it. He was quiet the whole time, which is how Pete listens. When I finished he said, “Want me to go talk to him?”

I knew what he meant. Not a fight. He meant he would drive over to Greg’s in the morning and stand in his kitchen and say the plain thing a man says to another man.

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

“Are you going to call him?”

That was the obvious thing. Call my brother, tell him I know, tell him to fix it. I stood on that step and thought about it until my ears ached.

But I knew Greg. Greg can talk Mom into anything in ten minutes. If I called him, he would be at her door by Saturday noon with a reason, a hug and a story, and she would believe him because she wanted to.

And I knew he would turn it on me. He would say I was the one upsetting her. He would say she was confused, that she had misplaced the money herself, that I was overreacting.

“What about the sheriff?” Pete asked carefully. “Or that lawyer in Fergus who did your dad’s estate?”

“I’m not calling the sheriff on my own brother over Mom’s kitchen table,” I said. “And I’m not handing this to a lawyer to fix. It’s her money, Pete. It ought to be her decision. Made with her own hand.”

He was quiet a moment. “Then what do you need from me?”

“I’m staying the weekend,” I said. “Can you plow her out Monday morning? Early. We’re going to the bank when it opens.”

“I’ll be there at six,” he said. And he was.

The green notebook

I slept in my old room under the slanted ceiling. I did not sleep much. I kept hearing Mom get up and walk to the kitchen and back, the floor creaking in the hallway.

Saturday morning I made pancakes, because that is what you do in our family when something is wrong. Mom ate half of one. Then I asked her to get out all the green notebooks she still had.

There were six of them in the bottom drawer of the desk. The last six years. Every year since Dad died.

“Why do you want those?” she asked.

“Because we’re going to go through them,” I said. “Every page. You and me.”

We spread them out on the oilcloth. I had her read each entry out loud while I checked it against the bank statements she keeps in a shoebox. It took us most of the day.

Every number was right. Every single one. Six years of checks to the church, the electric, the propane man, the Schwan’s truck. All of it to the penny.

There was one mistake, in March three years ago, where she had written a seven that looked like a one. She had caught it herself the next week and drawn a neat line and corrected it in the margin.

“See there,” I said, and I put my finger on it. “That’s what confused looks like on you, Mom. You catch it in a week and you fix it.”