The Friday I Signed Grandma Out

She braided Deb’s hair before school. She sewed her Easter dress on the treadle machine. When Aunt Carol got well enough to take her back, Grandma cried in the barn so Deb would not see.

So no, this was not some distant cousin dipping into a stranger’s account. This was a woman stealing from the only mother she had really known.

Deb had not called in a while. I knew that, the way you half-know a thing. What I had not known was that she had found a better use for her Fridays than the phone.

Here is what stung, and I will be honest about it, because there is no point otherwise.

Deb was the one who had set up the lunch Fridays in the first place. Back in the spring she came to me full of a good idea. Said Grandma was pining in that place. Said she would take her out every week, get her a tenderloin at the diner, give her some air and some family.

I had been grateful.

I had a job and two kids and a husband who worked second shift. Here was my cousin stepping up to carry a Friday I could not carry. I told her she was an angel. I said those words across my own kitchen table. An angel.

She took the compliment and the standing appointment both.

Then she drove my grandmother nine miles the wrong direction, to a bank, and stood at the counter and did the talking while a confused old woman signed her name eleven times.

What She Told Herself

I want to tell you I waited and planned this out cold. I did not.

The night I got home from the bank I called Deb. My hands were shaking so bad I had to set the phone on the counter and lean over it.

She did not deny it. That was the strangest part.

She got quiet. Then she started explaining. The explaining was worse than any lie she could have told.

Deb was behind. Way behind. A truck payment, a second mortgage on a house she and her husband Kim could not sell, a credit card that had rolled over into something with a lawyer’s letterhead.

She told me the numbers in a rush. Like if she said them fast enough they would add up to a reason.

“She’s got it just sitting there, Alison,” Deb said. “She doesn’t even know what day it is. She doesn’t know the money’s gone.”

“Deb.”

“She is never going to miss it. I was going to pay it back. I swear to God I was going to pay every dime of it back when the house sold.”

That was the thing she had told herself. I heard it clear.

She had looked at a woman who could not count the days of the week and decided a person who cannot count cannot be robbed. That the money was not real, because the mind that owned it was going soft.

“She raised you,” I said. “When your mama was sick, she raised you in that farmhouse. You slept in the little room off the kitchen.”

Deb was crying by then. “I know it,” she said. “I know it, Alison. Don’t you think I know it.”

I hung up.

I sat at my table a long time. Somewhere in that long time I stopped shaking and started thinking.

The first clear thought I had was that next Friday was coming. Deb would be at that desk at ten o’clock with the pen in her hand. And I did not intend to let her reach it.