Every Friday at the Legion Fish Fry

How I Found Out

My name is Debbie Sorensen. I was fifty-two that winter.

I work as a nurse’s aide at the clinic in town, taking blood pressures and weights and walking people back to rooms, and I have done it for twenty-two years.

My husband, Tom, is fifty-five and runs the service bays at the Ford dealer out on the highway.

He has grease in the creases of his hands that no soap in America has ever gotten out, and I have stopped trying to make it happen.

We live in a small town in western Wisconsin, the kind of place with two churches, one bank, a feed mill, a Kwik Trip, and an American Legion post that still does a fish fry every Friday of the year.

My grandfather is Walt Lindquist. He was drafted in 1953, at eighteen, and went to Korea with the Army in the last spring of the war.

He came home, married my grandmother, and ran the cheese vat at the creamery for thirty-eight years.

Grandma Arlene died six years ago, in February, of a stroke at the kitchen table. Grandpa found her.

He sat with her until the ambulance came, and the deputy who took the call told me later he was still holding her hand.

After that, Grandpa stayed in his own house. He was sharp as a tack and stubborn as a fence post, and nobody was going to move him into anything with a call button and a dining room.

So we built a little system around him. A home care girl named Kim came Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

I came Monday, Wednesday and Saturday after work to set up his pills, check his feet, and make sure there was food in the house.

Marcia lived twenty minutes away, over in the next town.

When Grandpa had his heart procedure five years ago, the hospital social worker asked about a power of attorney, and Marcia was the obvious choice. She was his daughter. My mother had died young.

I never thought one thing about it. Marcia paid his bills, handled the bank, and called me every so often to ask how his feet looked.

That was the arrangement, and for four years it seemed to work fine.

Then, in January, Grandpa’s property tax check bounced.

He called me at the clinic. He never called me at work.

The front desk girl came back and found me in room three with a farmer’s blood pressure cuff in my hand and said my grandpa was on the line.

“Debbie,” he said, “the county treasurer sent me a letter. It says my check came back. I have never in my life had a check come back. Can you come over tonight and look at something with me?”

I drove straight there after my shift. Grandpa had the kitchen table cleared off, and on it he had laid out a year and a half of bank statements in neat stacks, every one of them opened and flattened.

He had his reading glasses on, the big ones, and a yellow pencil. He had already circled things.

That was the first thing I understood that night: he was not asking me to find out. He was asking me to see what he already knew.

There were four payments to two universities, one in Eau Claire and one in La Crosse.

They added up to about forty-one thousand dollars. There was one wire to a title company for fifty-five thousand.

Ninety-six thousand dollars, in eighteen months, out of savings Grandma and Grandpa had built one creamery paycheck at a time.

He had about a hundred and forty thousand when Grandma died. Now there was a little over forty-four.

“The college is for Ashley and Megan,” Grandpa said quietly.

“Marcia’s girls. The title company is a house. Ashley and her husband bought a place in Chippewa Falls last summer. I saw the pictures at Christmas.”

I sat there with the statements in front of me and my coat still on. I remember the furnace kicking on.

I remember the clock over the stove, the one shaped like a teapot, ticking louder than any clock should tick.

“Grandpa,” I said, “did you say she could do this?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody asked me. I saw it in October. I’ve been sitting with it since October.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was hoping I read it wrong. I didn’t read it wrong.”