The Front Pew and the Choir

What Denise Said

I called Denise from the clinic parking lot that same afternoon. Dad sat in the truck with the window down, watching a man across the street unload lumber.

I told her what Dr. Larsen had said. I read her the number off the card. I said Dad had the money in his account, I was sure of it, and that Dr. Larsen could fit him in two weeks.

“I’ll look into it,” she said.

That was June. In July I asked again, and she said she was still looking into it. In August I took the stack of unopened bank envelopes out of Dad’s desk, opened every one at his kitchen table, and saw the twenty-two thousand dollars.

The bank still sent a paper statement to the farm every month. Denise did everything online, but Dad had never let them stop the paper ones. I had carried them in for four years without once opening one.

The night I called her about the withdrawal, I lay awake next to my husband and stared at the ceiling until the window went gray.

Dan has sold feed for the co-op for twenty-six years. He knows every dairy barn in three counties and which farmer is a day behind on his bill.

“Talk,” he said at about two in the morning, without opening his eyes.

So I told him. The twenty-two thousand. The hearing aids. Denise saying an eighty-eight-year-old man did not need them. Dad nodding at coffee hour. All of it.

He was quiet a long time. Dan is never quick. He thinks like he drives a loaded truck, slow into the corners.

“What’s the court say?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ll call Monday.”

“Call Monday,” he said. “And don’t go over there and have it out with her. You’ll just cry, and she’ll just get colder. You know how she gets.”

He was right about that, too. I have never once in my life won an argument with my sister. She just stopped talking to you until you gave up.

The Courthouse

Monday on my lunch break I drove to Neillsville and found the Register in Probate’s office at the courthouse. A woman named Joan with reading glasses on a beaded chain pulled up Dad’s file.

“The conservator is supposed to file an accounting every year,” she said, scrolling. “I’m showing the inventory when she was appointed, and the first two annual accounts. Nothing for the last two years. None at all.”

“So nobody’s been checking,” I said.

Joan looked at me over her glasses. “We send reminders. You can raise it. You’re his daughter. You can petition the court for an accounting, and you can ask the court to review the conservator.”

She gave me the forms. I filled them out at a little table in the hallway. I wrote down the date of the withdrawal and the amount.

When I handed them back, I asked how long it would take.

“The judge will set a hearing,” Joan said. “Notice goes out to your sister.” She checked a calendar. “Right now the probate calendar is out into January.”

“January,” I said. “That’s five months.”

“I’m sorry, hon. It’s a small county and it’s one judge.”

I sat in my car in the courthouse lot for a long time after that. I had done the right thing. But the right thing was going to take until January, and none of it put a dollar in my hand for Dad’s ears.

I could not take money out of his account. Only Denise could. The court was not going to rush. And my father was going to sit in that back pew every Sunday until Christmas, nodding at nothing.

I thought about Mom. I thought about how she used to reach back over the pew during the anthem and squeeze Dad’s knee when he hit a low note just right.

Dad could not wait five months to hear. That was the whole thing, when I boiled it down. Whatever happened with Denise and the court could happen in its own time. But not that.