My aunt held my mother’s power of attorney for her last two years, and nine weeks after the funeral the county mailed me a hearing date for the farm Mom left me, over $11,860 in taxes nobody paid. Aunt Patricia said, “Kathleen should’ve left it to somebody who stayed.” Then I saw whose name was on the petition.
Kody Hensley.
Her son. My cousin, thirty-six years old, who I taught to bait a hook off our dock.
Sixty-one acres, the house my dad framed with his own two hands, and Mom’s tomatoes still hanging on the vines because nobody had picked them. If I didn’t pay the county by Thursday, November 12, Kody walked out of that hearing with a deed to all of it.
I had $2,300 in checking.
I called the Greene County treasurer’s office from Mom’s kitchen. A woman named Deanna pulled the file and didn’t say anything for a second.
“The taxes went unpaid for 2023 and 2024,” she said. “A buyer picked up the certificate at the sale last fall. He’s petitioning for the deed.”
“My mother paid her taxes every year of her life.”
“Not those two, ma’am.”
I hung up and opened the drawer by the stove where Mom kept everything.
Rubber bands. A church cookbook. About forty twist ties. Her checkbook.
Two stubs, a year apart, in that shaky handwriting she had at the end. Pat — taxes. $5,930 each.
I drove to Aunt Patricia’s that night and set the checkbook on her counter.
She didn’t pick it up.
“Your mother was confused at the end, Becky. You’d know that if you’d been here.”
“You cashed them.”
“I handled things. Somebody had to.” She wiped the counter all the way around the checkbook like it was a spill. “Sell that junk motorcycle in the shed if you want to feel useful. It won’t cover a third.”
The junk motorcycle was Dad’s.
He rode it right up until the morning his heart quit in 2009, and Mom never let anybody touch it after. Cream tank with a dent on top shaped like a horseshoe. A green seat split down the middle and stitched shut with fishing line.
I didn’t want to sell it.
I listed it anyway, $4,000, and hated every word of the ad.
One man answered.
He came out Saturday on a black bike, early thirties, head shaved, tattoos climbing up his neck and over the backs of both hands. Said his name was Colton.
I pulled the tarp off and he went completely still.
He crouched and ran his thumb along the dent in the tank. Then along the fishing line in the seat. Then he got up, walked out of the shed, and made a phone call with his back to me.
When he came back in, his face was set hard.
“Where’d your dad ride, ma’am? Back around ’06?”
“Everywhere. State Road 57, mostly. Why?”
“Because a man on THIS bike pulled my father out of a ditch on 57 in the rain and carried him forty minutes to the ER on the back of it. Dad’s told that story every Thanksgiving for twenty years. Cream tank. Dent like a horseshoe. Seat sewed up with fishing line.”
I had to sit down on a feed bucket.
“He never told us that.”
“Sounds like him, from what my dad says.” He looked at the bike for a long time. “I’m not buying this. NOT FROM YOU. Not for any money.”
My stomach dropped. He was the only buyer I had.
Then he asked why I was selling it, and I told him all of it. The checks. Kody. The hearing.
He wrote the parcel number on the back of his hand with my pen.
“What time Thursday?”
“Nine.”
“Keep the bike in the shed,” he said, and he left.
I didn’t hear from him again.
Not Sunday. Not Monday. Not Wednesday, when I sat up until two in the morning at Mom’s table with the checkbook, the hearing notice and $2,300.
Thursday I was on the courthouse steps at 8:40 in my one good blazer.
Aunt Patricia came up the walk in her church coat. Kody was behind her in a tie, carrying a leather folder, next to a lawyer I’d never seen before.
Kody stopped two steps below me and smiled.
“You should’ve sold the junk bike, Becky.”
“You were TEN when he taught you to ride it.”
“And I’m thirty-six now.” He pointed past me at the doors. “Go on in. Watch me sign.”
Then the street started shaking.
It came up from the south end of town, low at first, and then everybody on those steps turned around.
Motorcycles.
They backed in at the curb one after another, rear tires to the concrete, in a row that ran clear past the bank. I counted because I couldn’t do anything else. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. SEVENTEEN.
Colton swung off the first one with a manila folder under his arm.
He came up the steps and stopped beside me, a half step in front, and looked right at Kody.
“Morning, ma’am,” he said to me.
Kody’s smile went somewhere else.
Inside, the riders filled the back three rows of a room built for maybe twenty and stood along the wall for the rest. Not one of them said a word. An older man with a gray ponytail took his cap off and held it on his knee.
The magistrate looked at them over her glasses for a long moment.
Kody’s lawyer started in on the certificate, the notice, the redemption period.
Colton stood up.
“Your Honor, before you sign anything, I’ve got something for the record.”
He walked the folder up and laid it on her bench. Then he turned around and looked at my aunt.
“Mrs. Hensley,” he said. “TELL HER WHOSE BANK STAMPED THE BACK OF THESE.”
Aunt Patricia’s hand went flat on her purse.
Kody looked at his mother.
She didn’t look at anybody.
Account ending 0417
The magistrate opened the folder and read the top sheet without touching the rest.
“These are copies from the treasurer’s tax sale file,” she said. “Two checks, dated October 8 of last year. They paid for the certificate on this parcel. Twelve thousand four hundred and fourteen dollars.” She turned the sheet over. “Drawn on the account of Patricia A. Hensley. Paid by the bank across the street. Account ending 0417.”
Everybody in that room knew which bank. The motorcycles were lined up in front of it.
Aunt Patricia took her hand off her purse.
“I lent my son money,” she said. “That’s not a crime, last I heard.”
Kody’s lawyer was already standing. He was a thin man named Mercer with a cough he kept apologizing for. “Your Honor, where my client’s funds came from has no bearing here. The certificate was bought at a public sale. The owner had a full year to redeem.”
“The owner was dying,” I said.
I took Mom’s checkbook out of my purse and held it in my lap with both hands.
“Ms. Mathis.” The magistrate didn’t raise her voice. “Until I sign, you can still redeem. With interest and costs it’s thirteen thousand two hundred and six. Can you pay that today?”
“I have twenty-three hundred.”
She looked at the folder a while. Then at the back three rows.
“I’m continuing this to Tuesday, November 24, at nine,” she said. “Ms. Mathis, you bring me the redemption. Or you bring me where Mrs. Hensley’s money came from before it was Mrs. Hensley’s. Otherwise I sign.”
Mercer shut his briefcase hard enough that the riders along the wall looked over.
When the room emptied, the man with the gray ponytail stopped at the end of my row with his cap still in his hand.
“Levi Burch,” he said. “Your dad carried me to the ER on that bike.”
He turned the cap around once.
“What did your mother say, when she found out about the taxes?”
Birthday checks
“She didn’t know,” I said. “She’d have told me.”
He nodded like a man who’d been told things before, and put his cap on, and went out to the bikes.
Aunt Pat sent me a check every birthday until I was forty. Twenty dollars, then twenty-five after 2000. Every one had something on the memo line in her square little capitals. BECKY 16. BECKY COLLEGE. BECKY NEW HOUSE.
Their mother raised both girls that way. Nothing left the checkbook without a word on the line saying what it was for. Mom kept doing it after her hand shook so bad she could barely make the letters, and that’s why her stubs said Pat — taxes and not just a number.
Pat and Mom lived nine miles apart on 57 their whole lives. I left for Indianapolis at twenty-two and came home for Christmas and two weeks every July.
Pat was the one who stayed. She drove Mom to the heart doctor in Bloomington every Tuesday for two years, and she made sure every one of us knew it. At the funeral lunch she told the pastor’s wife about the Tuesdays three separate times.
Kody was the kid who followed my dad around the machine shed. Dad put him on the cream bike in the hayfield the summer he turned ten, running alongside with one hand on the back of the seat. Kody dumped it in the soft dirt twice, cried, and got back on.
Mom kept everything in that drawer by the stove. The receipt for a casserole dish from 1991. The church cookbook from 1994, with her funeral potatoes on page 112 and her name printed under them, Kathleen Mathis, which she was prouder of than she ever let on.
I didn’t sleep Thursday night.
Friday morning I was standing at the bank across the street when they unlocked the doors.
The bank across the street
The woman at the desk was named Jordyn, and she had the look of somebody who’d been told to be careful with me.
Mom’s account was closed. March 19, six months before she died, by Patricia Hensley under the power of attorney. The balance, $1,812, went out by transfer the same morning. Every statement after January had been mailed to Pat’s address.
“I need copies of two checks my mother wrote,” I said. “One from 2024, one from 2025. Front and back.”
“Once the estate’s opened and you’ve got letters from the court, I can request them. It’s ten business days from the archive.”
The hearing was eleven days out, counting the weekend.
I asked about a loan against the farm. Jordyn was nice about it. Nobody lends on land with somebody else’s tax certificate against it, and nobody lends thirteen thousand dollars to a woman with twenty-three hundred in checking and a house payment in Indianapolis.
I walked over to the courthouse annex and paid $177 to open Mom’s estate. The clerk said letters would take a week if the judge signed on time.
That night I called Aunt Pat. I told her if she paid the county what she took, I’d leave it there. I’d never say another word about it to anybody.
“I didn’t take anything,” she said. “I drove your mother to Bloomington every Tuesday for two years. Ninety-four miles round trip. You want to talk about what’s owed, start there.”
“The county doesn’t take Tuesdays.”
She hung up.
Saturday morning Kody’s wife drove out to the farm with a pan of noodles.
Madison was the only Hensley who ever called me hon and meant it. She sat at Mom’s table with her coat on.
“Kody’ll give you fifteen thousand for a quitclaim,” she said. “Cash, once it’s done. That’s fifteen more than you get if the magistrate signs.”
“It’s sixty-one acres, Madison.”
“It’s sixty-one acres somebody has to pay taxes on, and you live two hours away.” She pushed the noodles an inch toward me. “Pat says if this goes to the prosecutor she loses her house. You want that on you? Your mom’s sister?”
“Did you know where the money came from?”
She looked at the pan. “I know Kody’s wanted this place since he was ten.”
She left the noodles. I put them in Mom’s fridge and didn’t eat them.
Monday I went back to the bank with the receipt from the estate filing, in case it sped anything up. It didn’t. But Jordyn came out from behind her desk and walked me to the door, which she hadn’t done before.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said. “Your aunt was in here Saturday asking for copies of those same two checks.”
October 14
I called Deanna at the treasurer’s office that afternoon, to get the redemption number in writing.
She read it off. $13,206. Then she didn’t say anything for a second, same as the first time.
“Ms. Mathis, I should have said this when you called before. Your mother phoned here last October. The fourteenth. She asked if her taxes were paid, and I told her the certificate had sold at the sale. She asked me who bought it.”
“You told her?”
“It’s public record. I told her.” Deanna stopped. “She asked me to spell the name. She spelled it back to me twice. Then she said thank you, and she said she’d take care of it.”
Mom lived ten more months after that phone call.
She saw me at Christmas. She saw me in July. She sat in Pat’s Buick every Tuesday and rode to Bloomington and back.
She never said one word.
I sat at her table until the kitchen went dark. Then I got up and pulled the drawer by the stove all the way out.
Page 112
Rubber bands. Twist ties. The church cookbook, its spine gone soft as cloth.
I opened it to page 112, because that was the only page in it that ever mattered to her.
A bank envelope was folded flat against Kathleen Mathis, Funeral Potatoes. The flap was tucked in, not sealed.
Inside were two photocopies on the bank’s paper, dated November 3, 2025. Mom’s two checks, front and back. Pay to the order of Patricia Hensley. $5,930.00. Memo: taxes, in that shaky hand.
On the back of each one, in square little capitals, P. HENSLEY. Under it, the bank’s deposit stamp. Account ending 0417.
A sheet off a notepad was folded around them. She’d pressed so hard the pen came through on the other side.
Becky.
I knew.
Pat drives me Tuesdays.
Don’t let her tell you I was confused.
I read it standing at the stove. Then I read it again sitting on the floor with my back against the cabinet.
She was the account holder. She could walk into her own bank and ask for her own checks, and she had, three weeks after Deanna spelled that name for her. Then she put them in a book Pat had never once cooked out of.
Ten months in the passenger seat, knowing.
Every Tuesday Pat drove her there and back, and every Tuesday Mom would have said thank you at the door. She said thank you to the man who read the gas meter.
I didn’t need Colton’s folder to remember the other number. The magistrate had read it out loud to a room full of riders.
Account ending 0417.
Tuesday, November 24
The same seventeen were backed in at the curb past the bank. I didn’t count them this time. Colton did, and told me on the steps like it was the weather.
Inside, I walked Mom’s envelope up to the bench myself.
The magistrate read the checks first and the note last. She held the note longer.
Then she opened the folder from the first hearing and laid the county’s copies next to Mom’s. She turned one of Pat’s checks around so the room could see the face of it.
“Memo line,” she said. “K. M. TAXES.”
Square little capitals.
Aunt Patricia was on her feet before Mercer could reach her sleeve.
“And they’re paid. Every dime of Kathleen’s taxes went to the county. Look it up. I paid them.”
“In your son’s name,” the magistrate said.
“Somebody had to keep that place in the family. Becky lives in Indianapolis. She comes home two weeks in July, puts flowers on the table, and drives off. I drove Kathleen ninety-four miles every Tuesday for two years. Two years. Nobody paid me for one Tuesday. Not one.”
“Mrs. Hensley.”
“Kathleen was going to leave it to Becky anyway, and Becky would’ve sold it inside a year. Kody’s the one who loves that place. He was the one in the shed with Kathleen’s husband every summer.” She turned around to her son. “Tell her. Bidding on it was your idea.”
Kody was looking at the copies on the bench. He hadn’t said a word all morning.
“You told me it was your savings,” he said.
“It was my account.”
“You told me Aunt Kathleen wanted me to have it.”
Mercer sat down.
Kody got up, walked the length of the room past the riders along the wall, and went out. He didn’t look at his mother on the way.
The magistrate denied the petition. She said the money that bought the certificate was the owner’s own tax money, handed to her agent to pay the county, so as far as she was concerned the taxes on that parcel had been paid by Kathleen Mathis and the certificate was void. Then she looked at me over her glasses and asked whether the estate intended to refer Mrs. Hensley’s conduct to the prosecutor. If it didn’t, she said, she would have to ask why.
Pat looked at me then.
“Becky. I’m your mother’s sister.”
The clerk slid the form across. Mom’s note was still lying face up on the bench where I’d put it. Pat drives me Tuesdays.
I signed it.
The machine shed
Thanksgiving was two days later. The first one of my life I didn’t eat at Pat’s table.
In the morning I pulled Mom’s tomato vines. The frost had gotten them, and the last few tomatoes came off in my hand like wet paper.
I took my coffee down to the dock after. No truck came down 57 from that side of the family all day. Nobody called. I hadn’t expected them to.
Around two, two motorcycles came up the drive. Colton, and his dad on an old blue bike behind him.
Levi walked straight past the house to the machine shed, like he’d been there before. I pulled the tarp.
He stood over Dad’s bike a long time. Then he crouched the way Colton had, and put his thumb in the dent on the tank.
“I tried to give him forty dollars for the gas,” he said. “In the ER parking lot. Both of us soaking wet.”
“What did he say?”
“Said he didn’t sell rides.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has a parent’s checkbook sitting in a kitchen drawer.
For more stories of family disputes that spill into court and onto the land, read “The Paper Putting My Father Out Had a Blank Line For My Name” and “The Man Fencing Off My Dad’s Slab Grew Up in That House”. For a family reunion with its own unexpected history, see “The Woman At My Daughter’s Wedding Said She Sees Her Every Other Sunday”.
