The Last Checks Mom Handed Out at the Lake

The Register

My mother keeps a check register the way she kept a grade book. Every line is in blue ink, every entry is in cursive, every balance is carried forward, and there is never a crossed-out number.

So it took me about forty seconds to find it.

On the first of every month there were two checks, side by side, written in the same steady hand. Three hundred twenty dollars to Gwen Price. Three hundred twenty dollars to Sue Ebert. Memo line: lake dues.

I turned the pages back. August, July, June. Back through the spring, back through last winter, back through the winter before that. The pairs of checks went on and on like fence posts down a county road.

“How long?” I asked.

“Since the fall of twenty-three,” Mom said. “Thirty-six months, if you’re counting. I know you’re counting.”

I was. Thirty-six months at six hundred forty dollars a month is twenty-three thousand and forty dollars. I did it in my head twice, because I didn’t want to believe the first answer.

My mother’s pension from the Public School Retirement System comes to about three thousand fifty dollars a month after her Medicare supplement comes out. Missouri teachers don’t pay into Social Security. That pension is nearly the whole river.

Dad’s small Social Security survivor check, which only started last year after Congress changed the rule for teachers’ widows, goes straight to the payment on the new furnace she had to put in last January.

Out of the pension she pays the property tax on the house Dad built, the electric bill, the propane, her car insurance, her tithe, and her groceries.

And, it turned out, a little over a fifth of every check went to the lake.

“They said the cabins were for the family,” Mom said. She said it to the yard, not to me. “That’s what Gwen said. For the family. For the grandkids. A place we could all go.”

I hadn’t been invited to either cabin since the Fourth of July two summers before. My son Sam, who is fifteen, had been once. Mom had been twice that I knew of, both times for an afternoon.

“How did it start?” I asked.

How It Started

My sisters bought their cabins in the spring of twenty-two, a few months apart, in the same cove association on the Gravois arm of the Lake of the Ozarks. It was the year everything on the water sold in a weekend, and they each paid more than the places were worth.

Gwen is fifty and lives in Jefferson City. She’s an office manager for a dental group and her husband Ken sells farm equipment out of the John Deere dealer on Highway 50. Sue is forty-eight and lives in Sedalia, and her husband Jeff is a lineman for the co-op.

They are not bad people. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because the rest of this could make them sound like something they’re not.

The association had always charged dues for the private road, the shared sewer system, the gate and the community dock slips. Then the seawall along the cove started failing, and in the summer of twenty-three the board voted a special assessment on top of the dues, spread out monthly over five years.

“Gwen called me crying,” Mom said. “She said they were going to lose the place. She said the payment had jumped to three hundred twenty a month and with the interest on that cabin loan she didn’t know how they’d make it.”

“So you offered.”

“So I offered.” Mom folded her hands on the flyer. “Just until things settled down. And I couldn’t do it for one of them and not the other. You know I couldn’t. I never once gave one of you girls a cookie without giving the other two one.”

“You didn’t give me one,” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it sounded.

Mom looked at me then. “You didn’t need it, honey. You never asked me for anything in your life. Not even when you were putting yourself through pharmacy school on the night shift at that nursing home in Kansas City.”