The Morning Mom Took Back Her Checkbook

The call from the lobby

I thought we would go home then. I thought Mom would want to sit at her own table with a cup of coffee and be sad in private, and that I would deal with Greg later, in my own way.

That is not what she did.

She folded the printout in half and put it inside the green notebook. She walked over to the two upholstered chairs in the lobby, by the window and the fake ficus, and she sat down in one. She opened her purse and took out her flip phone.

“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m calling your brother,” she said. “Sit down, Linda.”

I sat. She found his number with her reading glasses on the end of her nose. She pushed the button for the speaker and she held the phone in her lap between us.

It rang four times. Then Greg picked up, cheerful, the voice he uses on the phone with clients.

“Hey, Mom! How are you holding up in this cold?”

“I’m at the bank, Greg,” she said. “With Linda. And with Karen.”

There was a silence on the line. It went on for a while.

“Mom,” he said, and his voice changed. It went soft and slow, the way you talk to a person who is not following. “Mom, you sound a little mixed up. Why don’t you let Linda take you home, and I’ll come by later and we’ll go over everything together, okay?”

I opened my mouth. Mom put one finger up without looking at me, and I shut it.

“I am not mixed up, Gregory,” she said. “I am sitting in the bank lobby with the printout in my lap. I know where my nine thousand dollars went, and I know what time it went there. And I have taken your name off my accounts with my own hand this morning.”

He did not say anything at all.

“I’m not calling to fight with you,” she said. “I’m calling to invite you to Sunday dinner. Twelve-thirty. Pot roast. You come by yourself, or you bring Sherry. But you come to my table and you tell me the truth to my face, the way your father would have.”

There was a long breath on the line. “Mom, I…”

“Sunday,” she said. “Twelve-thirty. I love you, Greg.”

She closed the phone. Her hands were perfectly steady now. She put the phone back in her purse and zipped it shut, and she looked out the window at the snow.

“Well,” she said. “That’s done.”

I have watched my mother do a great many hard things. Bury her husband. Sell the farm. I had never once seen her do the hard thing first, before anybody else could do it for her. I sat beside her in that lobby chair and felt about nine years old.

On our way out, Karen came around the end of the counter and helped Mom with her coat. She zipped the parka up for her, right to the brooch. Neither of them said anything. They did not need to.