Mom’s Lawn Chair on My Sister’s Dock

“It’s for Mom’s care someday, Lori,” my sister said through the speaker of my phone. “Don’t make this ugly. Mom doesn’t need to worry about any of it, and neither do you.”

I was sitting in the parking lot of the credit union on Main Street in Leesburg with the air conditioner on high. It was the middle of May and ninety-one degrees.

My mother was in the passenger seat beside me. She had the statement folded in her lap, the one the young man inside had printed for her after she showed him her driver’s license and asked, very politely, to see where her money was.

Denise did not know Mom was in the car. I had not told her. I had only said I had a question about Mom’s account, and she had answered before I could finish asking it.

“Two hundred and two thousand dollars,” I said. “The whole house, Denise. It went out of Mom’s account on March third and into yours. Every dollar of it.”

“I know where it went. I’m the one with the power of attorney.” Her voice was calm and a little tired, the way you talk to a child who keeps asking why. “We bought a place on the lake. It’s an investment. It’s for Mom’s care someday.”

“Mom’s care is right now,” I said. “Lakeside Oaks called me Tuesday. She’s two months behind. They wanted to know if the family had a plan.”

“I’m handling it.”

“You are not handling it. I paid them twenty-five hundred dollars out of my own savings on Wednesday so they would stop calling her room.”

There was a long breath on the other end. Then my sister said the thing I would hear in my head for the next seven weeks, every night when I turned out the light.

“Then you shouldn’t have, should you? Nobody asked you to. I’ll talk to you later, Lori. Phil’s got supper on.” And the line went quiet.

I set the phone face down. My hands were shaking, and I did not want Mom to see them, so I held on to the steering wheel.

Mom did not say anything for a long time. She smoothed the statement flat on her knee, the way she used to smooth a dish towel before she folded it. Her hands are spotted now, but they are still steady.

“A place on the lake,” she said finally. “Well. I always did like the lake.”

That was all she said on the drive back to Lakeside Oaks.

I got her settled in her chair by the window with a glass of ice water, and I drove home and sat in my driveway for twenty minutes.

My name is Lori Becker. I am forty-nine years old, and I have been a teller at a bank in Leesburg for twenty-two years.

I went back to my maiden name after my divorce, a long time ago, and never saw a reason to change it again.

My sister Denise is three years older than me. She married Phil Fowler when she was twenty-two, and they lived over in Tavares, about fifteen minutes from Mom and Dad, in a little house with a carport and a grapefruit tree that never stopped producing.

Our father, Walt, managed citrus groves for thirty years until the freezes and then the greening took most of them. He died in 2019.

After that it was just Mom in the house on Lee Street, the one they had bought in 1979 for forty-one thousand dollars.