The Toast at the End of the Dock

“You should,” I said, and I meant it. Heidi had a rough few years. She’d wanted a baby for a long time and it hadn’t happened.

She’d gained weight and hated pictures. She told me once she felt like she’d turned into furniture at every family thing.

Then, the third week of May, the invitation went up on Facebook. It wasn’t a get-together.

It was a lake house on Monkey Island for the weekend, a catered barbecue for forty, a pontoon boat for the afternoon, and a cake from the good bakery in Grove.

I looked at it on my phone during a cancellation at work and thought, well, good for her.

Maybe Carl got a better job than he’d let on. Maybe Mom helped. It didn’t cross my mind to wonder. That’s the honest truth.

It crossed my mind on the Wednesday before the party.

I was sitting on my porch steps after work with a glass of tea, doing what I always do on Wednesdays, which is open my bank app and look at both accounts. Checking first. Then savings.

Savings said two thousand three hundred dollars.

I thought it was a glitch. I closed the app and opened it again. I logged out and logged back in.

I sat there in the heat with the cicadas going in the elm tree and refreshed it four times like the number was going to change its mind.

Then I opened the history. One transfer. Four thousand five hundred dollars, savings to the linked account at the credit union. The same account I sent the car payment to every month. Dated May 14th.

May 14th was the Thursday before the invitation went up.

I want to say I was angry right away. I wasn’t. I was cold.

I sat on those steps so long the light changed, and the whole time a little voice kept saying, there’s a reason, she’ll call, there’s a reason.

She didn’t call. I don’t think she knew I’d noticed. I don’t think it occurred to her that I looked.

I thought about calling the bank. I did. I sat there with the number pulled up on my screen.

But I knew what they’d ask, because I’d read enough of those papers at the dentist’s office about patient privacy to know how these things get worded.

Did anyone else have your login information? Yes. Did you give it to them? Yes. Was the receiving account one you’d set up yourself? Yes.

I wasn’t going to tell a stranger on a phone line that my own sister was a thief, over a door I’d opened for her with my own hands.

And I wasn’t going to call Heidi three days before her fortieth birthday and have it out with her over the phone, either. She’d cry.

She’d say she was going to put it back. She’d ask me not to tell Carl. I knew the whole conversation before it happened, because I’d had a hundred like it.

So I didn’t call anybody. I went to bed and didn’t sleep. Thursday I cleaned eleven sets of teeth and smiled at every one of them. Friday I did nine.

Saturday morning I got up before the sun, sat on my porch steps with my coffee, and changed my bank password.