The Reunion Grandma Paid For

How It Happened

Grandpa died in March of 2019. His heart, in his recliner, with the farm report on. Grandma found him when she brought him his coffee.

Those first months were a fog for her. There was the funeral and the casseroles and the death certificates, and the forms. There are so many forms when a farmer dies. The bank, the Farm Service Agency, the insurance, the county, the gas company.

Boyd was the one who handled them. He is the oldest. He lives four miles away. He is the one who sat at her kitchen table with a cardboard box full of envelopes and said, “Mama, you don’t need to worry about any of this. Let me handle the paperwork.”

That spring she signed a power of attorney for him at the lawyer’s office in town. Everybody does it. It made sense. She was seventy-nine and grieving and could barely keep track of which day the trash went out.

My dad would have been the other choice. But we lost my dad in 2015. His heart too, at forty-nine, in the cab of his pickup on the way home from the co-op. I was twenty-two. Grandma said once that it was the Tidwell hearts, that the men in our family love too hard and wear them out.

So it was Boyd. And Boyd had the gas company change the mailing address on Grandma’s royalty checks to his post office box in town. To handle the paperwork.

I believe, I truly do, that at first he meant to. I believe he meant to bring them out to her and help her deposit them and keep the statements straight.

But Boyd had a payment on a new pickup that year, and wheat was cheap, and the water hauling was slow. And the checks were made out to Pauline Tidwell, and he had a paper in his truck that let him sign for Pauline Tidwell.

Somewhere in there, the help turned into something else.

Thursday

I didn’t sleep much that weekend. On Thursday, Grandma came in for her set like always.

I washed her hair in the back sink with the warm water and the lavender shampoo she likes. She closed her eyes. I worked the suds through those thin white curls and thought about how small her head felt in my hands.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said with her eyes still shut. “About what Boyd said.”

“Me too.”

“I’m not going to call the sheriff on my son, Leah. I want you to know that before you say one more thing.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to.”

“And I’m not going to some lawyer to sue him. I’m not dragging my own boy into court in front of this whole county.” Her voice was firm. “Your grandpa would roll over.”

“Grandma, I don’t want any of that either.” I rinsed her slowly, cupping my hand over her forehead so the water wouldn’t run into her eyes. “But the checks are yours. The minerals are in your name. Aren’t they?”

She opened her eyes and looked up at me from the sink.

“They were in both our names,” she said. “Joint, with survivorship. The lawyer fixed it so when one of us went, it all came to the other one. Your grandpa insisted. He said he wasn’t going to leave me in a mess.”

“Then they’re yours. Every one of those checks has your name on it.”

She was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Well. How would a person even get them sent back?”

That was the question I had been waiting for her to ask.