The Retreat I Gave Grandma June

“The lawyer wanted fourteen to take it,” Mama said. “The good one. From the city. He said he could get it knocked down to where Jesse keeps his life.” She finally looked up at me. “I didn’t have it, Casey. I don’t have anything. You know I don’t.”

“You could have asked me,” I said.

“You’d have said no.”

“I don’t know what I’d have said. You didn’t give me the chance to say anything.”

She put her hand flat on the table. “He’s your brother.”

“He is,” I said.

And here is the thing I have gone over a thousand times since, so I will just tell you plain. I did not fight her for it.

I thought about it. I thought about the credit union, and whether a joint account meant she had taken something that was legally mine or legally half hers, and I knew the answer before I finished thinking it. Both our names were on it. In the eyes of the law she had moved her own money. There was no sheriff to call. There was no paper to wave. There was nothing to sue, and even if there had been, I was never in a hundred years going to sit in a courtroom across from my own mother over my dead father’s son.

The money was gone. It went to keep my brother out of a cell. Those were just the facts, lined up, and no amount of me hollering at an old woman at a kitchen table was going to un-line them.

“Is it enough?” I asked her. “Did it do it?”

Her eyes filled. “He thinks so. The lawyer thinks so. The hearing’s in November.”

“Okay,” I said.

I picked the printout back up so she would not have to keep looking at it. I folded it twice and put it in my back pocket.

“Okay,” I said again. “Then it did what it was for.”

I let it go. I want to be honest that letting go is not the same as it not hurting. I drove home and I sat on my own porch in the dark and I grieved that money like it was a living thing, because in a way it was eight living things, and then I made myself done with it.

I did not know yet that Mama was not done with me.