The Checkbook on Grandma’s Kitchen Table

My phone buzzed against my hip at 11:40 on a Thursday, while I stood between two tables of third graders arguing over whose turn it was to carry the milk crate back to the kitchen.

I almost let it go. Then I saw the name on the screen. It was the bank.

I stepped into the hallway by the trophy case and answered. “Brooke, it’s Marcy,” she said. Her voice was low, like she had turned her back to the lobby. “I need you to come in after school. Today, if you can. It’s about your grandma’s account.”

“Is she all right?” I asked. “Did something happen to her?”

“She’s fine, as far as I know,” Marcy said. “It’s the checks. Honey, I pulled seven months of them this morning. That’s not your grandma’s hand.”

I don’t remember much of the rest of lunch duty. I remember a boy named Carter asked me if I was sick.

I said no, and he gave me half his graham cracker anyway, because that is what eight-year-olds do when a grown-up’s face goes strange.

My name is Brooke Lindahl. I was thirty-five that winter, teaching third grade in the same district I graduated from.

My grandmother, Evelyn, was ninety-one, and she still lived in the white farmhouse four miles north of town where she had lived since 1953.

She rented the cropland to the Miller boys and kept the yard, the garden and the rhubarb patch by the old windmill.

She had a home aide five mornings a week and a granddaughter twelve miles away. She considered both of those one more than she needed.

Two years before, after she slipped on the back step and cracked her wrist, my mother flew home from Arizona. The three of us sat at the bank and put my name on Grandma’s checking account as a joint owner, because Mom lives outside Mesa and I was the one close by.

Grandma signed the new card with her signature slanting uphill, the way it always had. Then she set the pen down and said, “There. Now you can bury me without asking anybody’s permission.” Marcy laughed so hard she had to excuse herself.

That was the same Marcy who was waiting for me at 3:50 that Thursday, in the little office behind the teller line, with a manila folder on the desk and the door shut.

She did not make small talk. She opened the folder and laid the copies out in two rows, front and back, the way you would lay out a hand of solitaire. There were sixteen of them.

Every one was for six hundred dollars. Every one was made out to Sandy Kuehl. The memo lines were all blank.

The dates ran from the middle of July to the end of January, about one every two weeks.

“Look at the E,” Marcy said quietly. She slid Grandma’s signature card next to the first check. “Your grandma makes her E with a big loop, like a cursive capital from a penmanship chart. This one is made like a backwards three. And it’s straight up and down. Hers climbs.”

I looked. She was right. It was close, the way a tracing is close. If you had not known my grandmother’s hand for thirty-five years, you might not have seen it.

“There’s more,” Marcy said. “Look at the check numbers. Thirteen eighty-one through thirteen ninety-six. Her regular checks, the ones she writes to the co-op and the church and the electric, are in the twelve hundreds. These came out of the back of the box.”