My younger sister phoned my credit union, told the teller she was reporting elder abuse, and wanted to know if the $41,800 in my savings had come out of our mother’s checking. “She answers phones at a tire shop,” Simone said. “Nobody saves that honest.” The teller sat beside me in tenth-grade chemistry, so she called me.
Mom is seventy-one. I’ve written every one of her checks since Dad died three Augusts ago.
The electric. The water. The pharmacy.
The property tax, in two halves, April and December.
Simone lives forty minutes away and comes for Easter and Mom’s birthday.
Yoko Fiore called me on my lunch break that Thursday and said right away that she wasn’t allowed to tell me anything.
“So I’m not telling you,” she said. “I’m just saying your sister has a loud voice and I’m the one who picked up.”
“What did you give her?” I said.
“Nothing. I’m not allowed to give her anything. I’m not allowed to give you anything either, so this call is about the weather.”
“How’s the weather?”
“Bad, Tamar. She had the number. To the dollar.”
That part I sat with.
I sat in the back lot behind the shop with a turkey sandwich on my knee and didn’t eat it, and a guy in a lifted truck honked at me for blocking the air hose.
Simone had seen my balance exactly once. At Easter I passed my phone around the table so everybody could see the new porch steps, and the banking app was still open behind the photos.
She’d held on to my phone for a long time. I remembered that now.
I didn’t call her.
Mom called me Friday night, which she doesn’t do, because Friday is her show.
“Simone thinks I ought to have somebody look over my statements,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Who?”
“Simone.”
Just like that.
She didn’t ask me if any of it was true. She asked if I’d mind bringing the checkbook to Sunday dinner.
“I don’t mind,” I said.
I minded so much I scrubbed my whole bathroom at eleven at night with the door shut.
Sunday dinner at Mom’s in Lodi is at four. It has been at four since I was in grade school.
Hunter was already there when I pulled up.
Hunter does not come to Sunday dinner. He watches football at home and Simone carries him back a plate under foil.
He had a pen in his shirt pocket.
Simone had a blue folder.
The clock over the stove still said five. Nobody has set it back since Dad.
She waited until the pot roast was on everybody’s plate, and then she opened the folder and fanned out Mom’s statements, printed off, with my checks gone over in yellow highlighter. Every single one.
“Six hundred and twelve dollars to the pharmacy in March,” she said. “Mom doesn’t take six hundred dollars of pills.”
“She does since the heart thing,” I said.
Simone didn’t look up. She turned the page.
“Two hundred and ten in cash in October.”
“That was the gutters.”
“Was it.”
Hunter cut his meat into very small pieces and watched me the whole time.
Mom held her water glass in both hands and didn’t drink from it.
Then Simone closed the folder and laid her hands flat on top of it like a teacher.
“And then there’s forty-one thousand eight hundred dollars sitting in your savings,” she said.
Mom set the glass down.
“You answer phones at a tire shop, Tamar. You drive a Corolla with a coat hanger for an antenna. You buy your jeans at the feed store. Where does somebody like you get forty-one thousand dollars?”
Hunter took the pen out of his pocket and clicked it.
Simone slid a stapled form across the tablecloth, right past the gravy. Durable power of attorney. Mom’s name typed at the top. Simone’s name typed on the line for the agent.
“Mom already said yes,” Simone said. “She just wants to sign it in front of you so it’s fair.”
I looked at Mom.
Mom looked at her plate.
“Mom?”
“I just want things simple, honey,” she said. “Simone says this is simpler.”
“I’m not calling you a thief,” Simone said. “I’m saying I CALLED THE BANK, because somebody in this family had to.”
“Credit union,” I said.
“WHAT?”
“It’s a credit union. And Yoko says hi.”
Simone went red from her collar up to her hairline.
Hunter put the pen down.
“She had no business telling you that,” Simone said.
“You had no business calling.”
“It’s MOM’S MONEY, Tamar. Every dime you’ve got is MOM’S MONEY and you KNOW it.”
Mom said nothing.
Not one word, in her own kitchen, with her own checkbook in my purse.
I didn’t argue. I got up and took my purse off the hook by the back door, where it has hung every Sunday for nine years.
The envelope came in Tuesday’s mail. I’d dropped it in my purse without opening it. Saturday night, I opened it.
“Sit down,” Simone said. “We’re not done.”
“I know,” I said.
I unfolded the statement and smoothed it flat on the tablecloth beside her yellow pages, and Mom leaned in to see, and Simone didn’t.
There are two names printed at the top of that account.
I have never said the second one out loud to anybody in this family.
I turned the page around so it faced my sister.
Kinsley M. Yarborough
She read the top line out loud because she couldn’t help it. Simone reads everything out loud. Cereal boxes. Road signs.
“Joint share savings. Tamar L. Orr.”
Then she stopped.
The second line said KINSLEY M. YARBOROUGH. Her daughter. Twelve years old, at a sleepover in Galt that night, which is the only reason any of this happened at a table she wasn’t sitting at.
Simone put one finger on her own daughter’s name like it might come off on her.
“Kinsley?” Mom said. She took her glasses off the top of her head and put them on. “Our Kinsley?”
“There’s only the one,” I said.
I sat back down. I put my purse on my lap and kept both hands on it. Mom’s checkbook was in there, and the other envelope, the one I hadn’t decided about yet.
Hunter leaned over Simone’s shoulder. He read slower than she did. His lips moved on the balance.
“You put my kid on your bank account,” Simone said.
“Credit union.”
“Don’t.”
Nobody touched the pot roast. The gravy had a skin on it already.
Hunter sat up straight and looked at me the way he looks at a menu when somebody else is paying.
“So how much of that is hers?” he said.
The bonds in Dad’s desk
Dad bought Kinsley a savings bond every birthday from the day she was born. Fifty dollars face value, the paper kind, back when you could still walk into a bank and get one. He kept them in a long envelope in the middle drawer of his desk with her name on the front in his square capitals.
On her third birthday he went to put the new one in and the envelope was empty.
Hunter had taken them. Simone was Kinsley’s mother and the bonds were in Kinsley’s name, so the bank let her cash them, and she did, and the money went into a transmission for Hunter’s truck. Dad found the stubs in the trash at their place three weeks later, when he went over to fix their sink.
He never said a word to either of them. He wasn’t a man who said words.
He drove to my apartment on a Friday instead, still in his work boots, and took me to the credit union on Cherokee. He sat beside me in one of those plastic chairs while I opened an account and put my niece’s name on it next to mine.
“Whatever you can,” he said. “Every Friday. Don’t skip one.”
“I make eleven dollars an hour, Dad.”
“Then whatever eleven dollars can do.”
What it could do was eighty-five dollars. I went through the drive-through every Friday on my way home from the shop and put in eighty-five dollars, cash, from my check. Nine years. The tellers changed. The tube got sticky. Yoko started working there the year Kinsley lost her front teeth.
Eighty-five dollars a week for nine years is thirty-nine thousand seven hundred and eighty. The rest is the dividends and Kinsley’s birthday checks from me, which I deposit straight back in.
“Don’t tell your sister,” Dad said, in the parking lot that first Friday. “Not till that kid can drive herself to the bank.”
So I didn’t. Not when Dad was sick. Not at the funeral, when Simone asked who was paying for the flowers and I said I was.
Kinsley knows. She found the statement in my glove box last summer when I drove her to a swim meet. I told her what it was and who started it. She cried a little about her grandpa and then asked if she could see the number every month.
So on the first of every month I send her a screenshot of the balance. She sends back a thumbs-up. Just the thumbs-up, nothing else, every month for a year.
I looked at Hunter across Mom’s table, holding his pen again.
He had found an envelope in a desk once before.
Six hundred and twelve dollars
“None of it is hers until she’s eighteen,” I said. “And none of it is yours.”
“You don’t get to tell me what’s mine where my kid’s concerned,” Simone said.
She had the highlighted pages back in her hands. She shook them at me, not hard, just enough that they made a noise.
“You know how this looks? You’ve got Mom’s checkbook. You’ve got Mom’s statements. And you’ve got forty-one thousand dollars in an account with my daughter’s name on it, which, by the way, I never signed off on. So either you’ve been taking Mom’s money and hiding it behind a child, or you’re the most generous tire shop receptionist in California. Which one, Tamar?”
“It’s eighty-five dollars a week,” I said. “From my check. You can look at the deposits.”
“Cash deposits.”
“Yes.”
“So no proof of anything.”
That one I hadn’t thought about. Nine years of drive-through receipts and every one of them says CASH.
I looked at Mom.
Mom had the statement now. She held it at arm’s length and squinted at Kinsley’s name like she was reading a menu in a dark restaurant.
“Honey, why wouldn’t you tell anybody?” she said to me.
“Dad asked me not to.”
That was a mistake. I knew it as it came out.
Mom put the statement down. Her face did what it does when the doctor says something she doesn’t like.
“Your father,” she said, “told you something he didn’t tell me?”
“Mom.”
“Forty-six years I was married to that man.”
Simone reached over and put her hand on Mom’s arm. Mom let her. That was the side of the table Mom was on, now, and all three of them knew it before I did.
“This is what I’ve been trying to say,” Simone said, soft for once. “She keeps things, Mom. She keeps everything. That’s why we need it written down.”
Hunter slid the power of attorney back toward Mom’s plate, one inch, with two fingers.
Mom picked up the pen.
The letter from the lender
I need to go back to Saturday, because that’s when I almost didn’t come at all.
Saturday morning I drove over like I do every Saturday. I bring her groceries, I check the pill organizer, I go through the mail on the counter by the toaster and sort out what’s a bill and what’s junk. She can’t stand the junk. She says it makes the kitchen look like nobody lives there.
Most of it was junk. A cruise brochure. Two of those fake checks from a car dealer. A card from her church.
And a long white envelope from a lender in Sacramento, addressed to Lorraine Orr, with a window.
I don’t open Mom’s personal mail. I open bills, because she asked me to, and this looked like a bill. So I opened it.
It wasn’t a bill. It was a letter thanking Lorraine Orr for starting her application for a home equity line of credit on the property on Mom’s street, in the amount of sixty thousand dollars. It said the application was incomplete. It said an authorized agent could finish it.
It gave the contact phone number they had on file, so I could confirm.
It was Simone’s cell. I know it by heart. I’ve called it every Christmas morning for twenty years.
The application date at the top was a Monday. Eleven days before Yoko called me in the back lot.
I stood in Mom’s kitchen with that letter for a long time. In the next room the TV was on, a man selling a mop. Mom was in her chair with her feet up, asking me if we were out of the good crackers.
“We’re fine on crackers,” I said.
I folded the letter back into its envelope and put it in my purse beside the credit union statement I hadn’t opened.
Then I went home, and I sat on my kitchen floor and opened mine, and I read both of them three times.
Sunday at four, when Mom picked up Hunter’s pen, that envelope was still in my purse on my lap.
I unzipped the purse.
Page two
“Mom,” I said. “Before you sign. Turn to page two.”
Simone said, “There is no page two, it’s all the same thing.”
But it was stapled, so there was a page two, and Mom is a person who turns pages. She has read the whole back of every prescription she has ever filled.
Page two was the list of powers. Banking. Bills. Insurance. Taxes. And one with a little box beside it that someone had already checked with blue ink: Real property transactions, including to sell, lease, or encumber.
“What’s encumber?” Mom said.
Nobody answered her.
I took the lender’s envelope out of my purse and laid it on the tablecloth next to page two. I didn’t say anything. I took the letter out, unfolded it, turned it to face her, and pointed at the phone number with the end of my fork.
Mom read it. Mom reads slow and she reads everything.
“Sixty thousand dollars,” she said. “On the house?”
Hunter said, “Lorraine, that’s just a, that’s a line, it’s not a loan, you don’t have to use it.”
“That’s your phone number, Simone.”
“It’s a contact number.”
Mom took her glasses off. She looked at the date at the top of the letter, then at Simone’s folder, then at the clock over the stove that’s said five since Dad.
“You started this before you called anybody about Tamar,” she said.
Simone opened her mouth.
Mom held up one hand, the one with her wedding ring still on it.
She put Hunter’s pen down on the tablecloth, very carefully, on top of the gravy stain.
Hunter’s pen
Simone did the talking. Simone always does the talking.
“Okay. Okay, fine. Yes. We’re behind on the house, are you happy? Two months. Hunter’s hours got cut in August and nobody asked, nobody in this family ever asks about us, because Tamar’s here every Sunday with her little checkbook being the good one. You think I wanted to do this? You think I like it? Mom’s sitting on a paid-off house and she’s seventy-one and she’s not going to use it. It was going to come to us anyway, half of it. I was just asking for it a little early.”
“By telling the credit union I steal from her,” I said.
“I had to have a reason! You think anybody gives you power of attorney because you ask nice? I needed somebody to have looked at it. And then I see that number on your phone at Easter, sitting there, and I thought, okay, that’s where it’s going, she’s been bleeding Mom for years, of course she has, look at her, she’s here every single week, why else would anybody come every single week?”
Mom put her hand flat on the table.
“Because I’m here,” she said.
Simone didn’t hear her. She’d turned back to me.
“And you know what, fine, it’s Kinsley’s money? Then it’s Kinsley’s. I’m her mother. Hunter, can a parent pull from a kid’s account?”
“Joint,” Hunter said. “If it’s joint, maybe.”
“It’s not hers until she’s eighteen,” I said. “I’m moving it to a custodial account Monday. Neither one of you will be able to touch it.”
“You can’t do that without me.”
“I can. It’s my name on it first.”
Hunter stood up. He took his plate to the sink, which I have never seen him do in sixteen years, and scraped the pot roast he hadn’t eaten into the garbage. He put his pen back in his shirt pocket.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
Simone gathered up the yellow pages and the folder and the power of attorney, page two and all. At the back door she turned around.
“You’re not seeing her,” she said. “You understand me? Not Thanksgiving. Not her birthday. You want to play her mother, you can do it by mail.”
The door didn’t slam. The screen door just bumped twice the way it always does.
Mom sat there with the lender’s letter in front of her. After a while she slid it across the tablecloth to me.
“You keep this,” she said. “You keep everything anyway.”
Thursday, the back lot
The next Thursday I ate my lunch in the back lot again. Same turkey on wheat. Same spot by the air hose, and I moved the Corolla over a few feet without anybody honking at me.
The custodial account was opened Monday, at the window, with Yoko. She wrote KINSLEY M. YARBOROUGH in the box with her tongue between her teeth and didn’t say a word about the weather.
Mom calls me Fridays now, before her show. She called the lender herself, Tuesday, with me sitting beside her on the couch, and asked them to cancel an application she never made. She made them spell encumber.
Simone hasn’t called. Thanksgiving is in three weeks.
On the first of the month I sent the screenshot like always. Nothing came back. I looked at that phone more times that day than I want to say.
At twelve forty, with half the sandwich gone, my phone buzzed. A number I didn’t know. A 209 area code.
No words. Just the thumbs-up.
I saved the number under K. Then I sent her the screenshot again, and I finished my sandwich.
If you’ve ever been the one who shows up every Sunday, send this to somebody who’d understand why.
Family secrets have a way of surfacing when money is involved – see what turned up in the note buried under a tree and the folder hidden for twelve years. And for another household shaken by a monthly check, read the story of a husband paying his mother $1,150 a month.
