Mom’s Eight Thousand Dollar Hot Tub

What Mark found out

Five weeks later, my brother called me at work. That alone told me something was wrong.

Mark is forty-seven and he does not make phone calls. He texts one word at a time, like each letter costs him a nickel.

He works at the grain elevator outside town, the same one Dad worked at, and in the fall he basically lives there.

Harvest runs seven days a week. Trucks of milo and soybeans line up down the county road from sunup until midnight.

“Sherri,” he said. I could hear the dryer fans roaring behind him. “Did Mom lend Tiffany money?”

I went out the back door of the pharmacy and stood by the dumpster so nobody would hear me. “Eight thousand,” I said. “In August. For the roof. She said you didn’t know.”

He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. Then he said, “There’s no roof, Sher. Nobody touched the roof. There’s a hot tub.”

He told me the rest standing out by the scale house, with trucks idling behind him.

A hot tub had shown up on the back patio in late August while he was working doubles. A four-person tub with a pale speckled shell and a hard cover that locked.

Tiffany had told him her mother sent money after her back surgery last winter, a little something to help her heal.

He had believed her because he had no reason not to. He even paid the electrician from Wellington to run a fifty-amp line out to it.

“Then the boys said Grandma’s check paid for it,” Mark said. “They heard her on the phone with her sister. I asked her straight out, and she didn’t even deny it. She just cried.”

“And the roof?”

“The roof’s fine. It’s got some hail marks, but it’s fine. It never leaked.” He let out a long breath.

“I feel sick, Sherri. I swear I didn’t know. I’d have never let her take a dime from Mom.”

I believed him. My brother is a lot of things, stubborn and quiet and too slow to smile, but he is not a liar.

He has worked since he was fourteen. He paid off his truck early. He has never borrowed money from anybody in his life.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I don’t have eight thousand. The surgery wiped us out, even with insurance. We’re still paying the hospital in Wichita every month.” He sounded like he hadn’t slept in a week.