Every Friday at the Legion Fish Fry

What He Asked Me

I knew what you were supposed to do. I work in health care. We have had the training about elder financial abuse every year since I started.

I knew the county had an adult protective services line, and I knew the sheriff would take a report.

I said so. I said it gently, but I said it.

I told him that what Marcia did was against the law, that a power of attorney is supposed to spend money for him and nobody else.

Grandpa listened to all of it. He let me finish.

Then he reached across the table and put his hand on mine, and his hand was cold, the way old men’s hands get cold in January.

“Debbie,” he said, “she’s my daughter. She’s the only child I have left on this earth. I am not going to have my girl in front of a judge at sixty-three years old. Your grandma would never forgive me. I would never forgive me.”

“She took your money, Grandpa.”

“I know what she took,” he said. “I can count. I ran a cheese vat for thirty-eight years, I can count to ninety-six thousand.”

He almost smiled. “I’m asking you not to do it. I’m asking you as a favor to me.”

I have thought about that night a hundred times since. People ask me why I didn’t just call the sheriff.

The answer is that a sharp, proud man of ninety-one asked me not to, about his own child, and it was his money and his child.

So I didn’t. But I did go home and tell Tom.

What Tom Said

Tom was at the kitchen table eating warmed-up hotdish when I came in.

He looked at my face and pushed the plate away before I even sat down, which is how I knew it was bad.

I told him everything. The tax check, the statements, the circles in yellow pencil, the two universities, the title company.

Tom did not say a word until I was done, and then he was quiet a while longer.

“Ninety-six thousand,” he said finally. He shook his head. “That’s a lot of Fridays at the vat.”

He rubbed his thumb along a burn scar on the back of his hand. “And he doesn’t want her charged.”

“He begged me, Tom.”

“Then that’s his call,” he said. “It’s his money and it’s his daughter, and he’s sharper than most of the men I work with. But that doesn’t mean she gets to keep the checkbook. He can take the keys back.”

That was Tom. He fixes things for a living. He does not waste time being angry at a bad transmission.

He just figures out which part failed and what it costs to replace it.

He was right, too. A person who still has his wits can revoke a power of attorney whenever he wants and name somebody new.

Grandpa had more wits than the three of us put together.

The next Monday, Tom took the morning off and drove us both to the bank.

Grandpa wore his good shirt and his tan cardigan and walked in on his own two feet with his cane.

The woman at the bank had known Grandpa for forty years. She sat with him for over an hour.

She asked him questions, plain ones, and he answered every one, and then he signed a revocation and a new form naming me.

He made one condition, and he made it to me, not to the bank. “The statements still come here,” he said, tapping the table.

“To my mailbox. I read them myself. You don’t ever get to be the only one who knows, Debbie. Neither does anybody.”

I said that was exactly how I wanted it.

The bank sent Marcia a letter saying her authority had been revoked. That was the letter she meant, that morning in his kitchen, when she said I only came around for money.