The Front Pew and the Choir

“Teresa, he’s eighty-eight years old,” my sister said, and I could hear her rinsing a dish while she said it. “It’s old age. He doesn’t need forty-six hundred dollars stuck in his ears.”

I was standing in my father’s kitchen with his March bank statement in my hand. The furnace had not kicked on yet for the season, and the linoleum was cold through my socks.

“Denise,” I said, “there’s a withdrawal on here for twenty-two thousand dollars. March fourteenth. I’m looking right at it.”

The water shut off on her end. For a few seconds I heard nothing but her breathing and, somewhere behind her, a television playing a game show to an empty room.

“It’s handled,” she said. “I’m his conservator, Teresa. Not you. It’s handled, and I don’t need you going through his mail like a detective.”

“I wasn’t going through anything. It came in the box at the end of the lane. I always bring his mail in. He can’t hear the mail truck. I keep the bank envelopes in his desk.”

“Then bring it in and put it on the table. That’s all you need to do.” Her voice went flat, the way it did when we were girls and she had decided a game was over.

“What did twenty-two thousand dollars of Dad’s money go to?”

“Expenses,” she said. “Good night, Teresa.” And then the line was quiet, and I stood there holding a phone that was not connected to anybody, in a house where nobody could have heard me anyway.

My father was in the next room in his recliner, asleep with the television on and the captions running across the bottom of the screen.

His name is Harold Malloy. He milked cows on this farm outside Greenwood for fifty-one years and he never missed a milking that I know of except the morning I was born.

He sold the herd at seventy-six, when his knees told him to, and rented the cropland to the Wendt boys down the road.

My mother, Ellen, died four years ago this November. She had a stroke in the church basement while she was cutting bars for a funeral lunch, and she was gone before the ambulance got out of town.

After that, Dad asked Denise to handle his money. Nobody made him. He went to the courthouse in Neillsville with her and signed the papers himself, and the judge named her his conservator.

I remember him explaining it to me at this same kitchen table. “Your sister’s good with figures,” he said. “You’ve got the heart, Teresa. She’s got the checkbook. Your mother always said so.”

He did not mean anything by it. Denise kept the books for her husband Rick’s repair shop for twenty years. I cook lunch for three hundred kids at the elementary school in Loyal and I balance my checkbook about once a season.

So when I say I did not have any say over Dad’s money, I mean it plainly. I could not write a check on his account. The court had given that to Denise.

What I had was my own money, my own two hands, and a father who had quit going to choir practice two years ago because he could not hear the piano.