Alana’s husband, Zain, brought his girlfriend to my daughter’s funeral, and while Alana lay seven months pregnant in an open casket, that girl leaned over to me and said, “Guess I get the nursery after all.” Zain was already telling people about the $380,000 policy. Then Alana’s lawyer, Sato, asked him to stay behind.
Alana had picked out a crib, a name and a pediatrician.
She didn’t get to use any of them.
I’d been standing by her since nine, because the funeral home in Kearney opened the chapel early for family.
My sister Helen kept a hand under my elbow like I might tip over.
Alana’s hands were folded on her stomach.
Whoever did her nails had painted them a pale pink. Alana bit hers to the quick her whole life. She’d have hated that pink.
I kept wanting to ask somebody for a file.
Then the door at the back banged open and a man laughed.
Zain.
He came up the aisle in a gray suit with the jacket open, still grinning at something on his phone.
And a girl was on his arm.
Red dress. Red heels you could hear over the organ.
Helen’s fingers dug into my arm.
People turned around in their chairs. Alana’s friends from the clinic. Her old softball coach. Zain’s own mother, three rows back, put her purse in her lap and stared at it.
He didn’t slow down.
“Mom,” he said when he got to me. He’d called me that for six years. “Rough day. You eating?”
“Who is that,” I said.
“This is Yael. She’s been a real help this week.”
Yael smiled at the casket like it was a cake she hadn’t ordered.
Then she leaned in, close enough that I got a mouthful of her hairspray.
“Guess I get the nursery after all,” she said.
I didn’t hit her.
I want that written down somewhere.
I looked at those pink nails instead, and I held on to the edge of the casket.
Zain wasn’t done.
He waved Mr. Hollister over from the side door.
“Before you close it,” he said, “I need that ring back. It was my grandmother’s.”
It wasn’t. They bought it at a mall, on sale, and Alana paid half.
Mr. Hollister looked at me.
I couldn’t make my mouth work.
“House goes on the market Monday,” Zain said, quieter, like he was doing me a favor. “I talked to the insurance people Thursday. Three-eighty. I’ll make sure you get something for the headstone.”
Something for the headstone.
Out of HER money.
Helen said, “You need to leave.”
“It’s my wife’s funeral, Helen,” he said. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Yael laughed at that.
He sat them both in the front row. MY row. The one with the little card that said family.
He moved the card so she could sit.
The pastor did his best. I couldn’t tell you one thing he talked about.
What I remember is Yael’s foot bouncing, that red heel tapping the pew in front of her.
And Zain checking his watch. TWICE.
When it ended, people lined up to say goodbye to her.
Zain stood and stretched his back.
That’s when a man in a brown suit came up the side aisle with a leather folio under his arm.
I’d never seen him in my life.
“You’re the husband,” he said to Zain. “I’m Sato. I was Alana’s attorney.”
“She didn’t have an attorney,” Zain said.
“She did since June.”
Something went across Zain’s face. A twitch at the corner of his mouth, gone before he got the grin back up.
“Okay. Can this wait? We’re kind of in the middle of something.”
“No,” Mr. Sato said. “She was very clear. She wanted it opened HERE, before the lid came down, with you standing in front of her.”
The line of mourners stopped moving.
Helen let go of my arm.
Zain laughed again, but he looked at Yael while he did it.
“Fine. Read it. Everything’s in my name anyway.”
Mr. Sato opened the folio.
Three pages, stapled. Alana’s signature at the bottom of each one in that tilted hand she’d had since fourth grade.
He didn’t start with the legal part.
He started with the note she’d clipped to the front.
“Zain,” he read. “I KNOW ABOUT YAEL. I’ve known since the night in May you left your laptop open on the couch.”
The red heel stopped tapping.
Zain’s grin stayed on a second too long, like he’d forgotten it was there.
“That’s not,” he said. “She was emotional. With the pregnancy, she was all over the place.”
“There’s more,” Mr. Sato said.
He read the next line without looking up.
“The policy you keep asking about is NOT YOURS. You’ll find out whose.”
Zain took one step toward the folio.
Mr. Hollister stepped in front of the casket and just stood there.
My knees went.
Helen caught me.
I hadn’t known. Not one piece of it. My daughter sat across from me every Sunday this summer and ate my pot roast and never said.
Mr. Sato turned the page.
“This one,” he said, “is addressed to Yael.”
Yael’s hand slid off Zain’s arm.
The second page
“Yael,” Mr. Sato read, “you asked him whether I’d picked yellow because I didn’t know what I was having. I picked it because my mother painted that room yellow when it was mine.”
I pulled my chair out from behind Zain’s leg and sat down.
There. One thing I could move where it belonged.
Mr. Sato continued.
“You can change the curtains. You can’t make the money he owes me disappear.”
Yael reached for the page.
Zain caught her wrist, then dropped it when his mother stood.
“She’s talking about household expenses,” he said. “We were married. Apparently now every grocery bill was a personal loan.”
Mr. Sato lowered the letter.
“Do you want me to continue here?” he said to me.
The question made Zain smile again. He leaned down, close enough that nobody behind us could hear.
“Your daughter wrote some things about you, too.”
Helen pulled a chair beside mine.
I wanted her to tell him to go. Better yet, I wanted her to fetch my daughter, who could settle this herself and complain about the flowers on the way out.
Instead, I put my hand out for the letter.
Mr. Sato gave it to me. The second sheet had the dent from Alana’s pen where she’d pressed too hard through the first.
Yael bent toward Zain.
“You said she gave you that money.”
He kept his eyes on me.
“Let’s do this somewhere private. You’ve been through enough.”
His concern arrived wearing its usual shoes: polished, expensive, headed toward something he wanted.
I folded the corner back where my thumb had bent it.
How much had my daughter paid him to keep him beside her?
The yellow room
In June, Alana brought a paint sample to my kitchen and set it beside the sugar bowl.
“Too much?”
It was the same yellow I’d used in her bedroom when she was eight. She’d taken the sample from the wall behind a shelf.
My husband left her that house before she married Zain. We’d moved somewhere smaller, and he wanted her to have a start that didn’t involve borrowing from everybody she knew.
At the kitchen table that afternoon, she held a folder against her stomach.
“Can you find the papers from Dad?”
“In the biscuit tin.”
She opened the cupboard without asking which one. There are families with filing cabinets. Ours had Christmas shortbread on the outside of the important documents.
She took the deed copy and the record of the money her father spent paying off the house.
Then she sat again.
“If I needed to come here for a while, would that be a whole production?”
“With a baby? I’d have the kettle on before you finished packing.”
“Without the baby yet.”
I put down my cup.
Before I could ask anything, Zain came through the kitchen door carrying a bag of pastries.
He kissed her head. He called me Mom. He put an apple turnover in front of me because he remembered what I liked.
That was his particular talent. He remembered your pastry while forgetting your daughter.
“She’s worrying about everything,” he said. “We need copies for the insurance. That’s all.”
Alana slid the folder under her bag.
I let him answer.
That part belongs to me.
When he went outside to take a call, she pushed a key across the table.
“Keep this somewhere he won’t borrow it.”
I put it on the ring with my own house key.
She also left a receipt in the biscuit tin. It was for her wedding ring, bought six years earlier. Beside the total, she’d written what each of them contributed.
Five hundred ninety dollars apiece.
“Why are you keeping this here?”
“Because you keep everything.”
She smiled, and I accepted that instead of asking again.
At the chapel, the key pressed into my leg through my coat pocket.
I pulled it out. Mr. Sato looked at it, then at me.
“She gave you that herself?”
“In June.”
Zain reached down.
“I’ll need that back.”
I closed my hand around it.
Five hundred ninety dollars
“Start with the ring,” I said.
Zain straightened.
“What?”
“You said it belonged to your grandmother.”
His mother was still standing beside the third row. She looked at him over the purse she held against her middle.
“Family things get complicated,” he said.
“Not this complicated. I have the receipt.”
Mr. Hollister moved closer to Alana’s hands.
“The ring will stay where it is,” he said.
Zain pointed at me.
“She can’t just decide everything.”
“You asked me to make every arrangement,” I said. “You wouldn’t answer the phone about the flowers.”
“I was dealing with insurance. Somebody had to handle the grown-up part.”
I was sixty-four. Apparently selecting a casket hadn’t earned me admission to adulthood.
Helen stood.
“She paid eleven thousand two hundred sixty dollars yesterday.”
“Helen.”
“No. He can hear it.”
Zain spread his hands.
“And I said I’d help.”
“When?” she said.
“When the money comes through. Obviously.”
He turned to his mother for support. She came up the aisle and touched my shoulder.
“Could we let people go home? Alana wouldn’t want everybody hearing this.”
Her hand was warm. I nearly covered it with mine.
Then she added, “Zain can put things right after.”
I moved away from her hand.
Alana’s friends were still beside the aisle. Her coach held his folded program so tightly the corner had gone soft.
I tried the smallest fix I could think of.
“Yael leaves. We finish saying goodbye. Then we deal with the letter.”
Yael looked at Zain.
He put his arm around her.
“She’s staying with me.”
“Then both of you leave.”
“You don’t get to throw me out of my wife’s funeral.”
He said it loudly enough for the back row.
A woman from the clinic took a step toward us. Helen put her hand out to stop her.
Zain pulled his phone from his pocket.
“If we’re going to discuss receipts, I’ve got some too.”
He opened a photograph and held it toward me.
Alana sat on the nursery floor beside pieces of the crib. Her head was turned away. There was a plate beside her.
“Tuesday,” he said. “We had dinner together Tuesday. Does that look like a woman afraid of her husband?”
Nobody had said afraid.
I took the phone before he could pull it back.
The plate held the chicken I’d sent home with her on Sunday.
He reached for it.
“Give me that.”
I returned it. My hand wanted to throw it into the flower stand.
Mr. Sato lifted the letter again.
“She asked that her mother hear the whole thing.”
“She’s heard enough,” Zain said.
Yael stepped out from under his arm.
“I haven’t.”
He stared at her. She looked at the page.
“Read the part about the money.”
Mr. Sato took a folded sheet from the folio’s inside pocket.
Across its top, in Alana’s handwriting, was a total: $28,716.42.
The amount in her notebook
I knew that number’s beginning.
Twenty thousand dollars.
Alana had saved it before she met Zain. She worked extra shifts at the clinic, drove the car her father helped her buy, and brought her lunch in the same bag until the handle gave up.
When she’d mentioned dipping into it the previous winter, she’d said they were sorting out his debts.
I told her marriages sometimes started unevenly.
I wanted that sentence back so badly I could taste the kitchen coffee I’d been drinking when I said it.
Mr. Sato laid the sheet on the chair between Helen and me.
The twenty thousand came first. Below it were transfers made over several months.
Alana wrote a reason beside each.
Car payment. Card balance. Another card balance.
One entry simply said, “He says this is the last.”
Yael pulled her phone from her bag.
Zain said, “Put that away.”
She moved her thumb down the screen.
“Which month was the eight thousand?”
“There’s no eight thousand,” he said.
“Eight thousand seven hundred sixteen,” she said. “And change.”
He reached for her phone.
She held it against her chest.
Mr. Sato tapped the total on Alana’s sheet.
“The later transfers add up to that amount.”
Yael looked toward the casket, then back at him.
“You said it was your bonus.”
“Part of it was.”
“You bought the motorcycle.”
“I sold another one.”
“You told me you hadn’t owned one before.”
His mother sat in the front row. There was nowhere else left for her to look except at her son.
Mr. Sato turned the sheet over.
A copy of an agreement was attached behind it. Zain’s signature sat below Alana’s.
I knew his signature. I’d seen it on birthday cards he signed after she’d written everything else.
“June eighteenth,” Mr. Sato said.
Zain started talking before he finished.
“We were having problems. People sign things when they’re trying to calm somebody down. She said she’d tell everyone if I didn’t.”
Yael lowered her phone.
“Tell everyone what?”
He rubbed his forehead.
“That we were taking some space.”
The agreement called it a separation.
Not a quarrel. Not one of those bad weeks wives were supposed to absorb like kitchen towels.
My daughter had been making arrangements to leave her marriage since June.
“She was letting you stay in the house?” I said.
“Until after the birth,” Mr. Sato said. “That was her choice. There were conditions.”
Zain pointed at the photograph on his phone.
“We ate together. We went to appointments. Ask anybody.”
“Did she know you were coming here?” Yael said.
He looked at her as though she’d failed a test.
“Obviously she couldn’t know about today.”
“Did she know we were together?”
Mr. Sato moved his hand to the letter.
“That’s what she wrote to you about.”
Yael reached for it again. Zain stepped between them.
His mother said his name.
He ignored her.
I held the agreement by its bottom corners. June eighteenth. Three days before the paint sample at my kitchen table.
My daughter had asked if she could come home.
I’d let the man who owed her money answer for her.
I stood too quickly. Helen put a hand against my back.
“Read it,” I said.
Zain came close enough that the paper touched his jacket.
“She put your words in there, Mom. Want everybody to hear those?”
The sentence about me
Mr. Sato didn’t move the page.
“We can take a moment.”
Zain nodded like he’d offered something generous.
“That’s all I’m saying. Give her a minute. She’s burying her daughter.”
I wanted to put my hands over my ears. A woman from the clinic was crying into the program. My daughter should have been hearing how much people loved her, not a list of things her husband bought.
Helen bent toward me.
“We can ask them all to go.”
Zain stepped back.
“I’ll settle the funeral bill. The whole thing. We can stop this right now.”
He’d found my sore spot. Eleven thousand two hundred sixty dollars out of the reserve I’d spent years building, and I’d been ashamed to worry about it while choosing the lining of a casket.
“What do you want?” I said.
He held out his hand.
“The papers. We handle our own business.”
Yael opened her mouth. He turned toward her.
“Please. Just give me five minutes.”
She sat down.
His mother nodded at me. She wanted me to take the offer. I could see the relief waiting on her face, ready for me to do the unpleasant part.
Mr. Sato kept the folio against his chest.
“These are her copies to receive,” he said. “I have the originals.”
Zain’s hand stayed out.
“You know what I mean.”
Yes. I did.
I could get my savings back. I could let everyone remember Alana as the wife who hadn’t known, rather than the woman who ate dinner across from a man while waiting for him to leave.
I looked at her hands.
I wanted one more ordinary thing. To complain about her nails. To tuck her hair behind her ear without Zain speaking over me.
“Give me the part about me,” I said.
Mr. Sato passed me the first page.
Halfway down, Alana had written, “Mom will tell you she should have known. Please don’t let her spend the rest of her life there.”
My finger stopped under the next sentence.
“I tried to tell her in June, but I got scared she’d say she’d warned me.”
I had warned her. Before the wedding, after he borrowed money for a holiday and called it a cash-flow problem.
I’d been right about him.
What a useless little prize that was.
I sat down and cried with my mouth open. Helen knelt beside my chair, and I held the back of her neck like we were girls again.
Zain rested a hand on the folio.
“Enough,” he said. “Look at her.”
Mr. Sato pulled it away.
The room waited for me.
I wiped my face on Helen’s tissue. It fell apart. Even the tissue had chosen a bad day to cut costs.
“Keep going,” I said.
Zain’s mother stood again.
“Please. Can’t she have some dignity?”
My chair scraped the floor.
“She can have her words.”
The June signatures
Mr. Sato placed the letter in my hands.
I read the rest of the page addressed to Yael.
“On May twelfth, you asked whether I knew you would be living in my house by Christmas. You wrote that you didn’t want another promise he couldn’t keep.”
Yael stared at her phone.
“He told you I’d agreed to leave. He told me you’d stopped seeing him.”
Zain said, “We talked after that.”
I read past him.
“I asked him to repay what he borrowed. He signed the amount himself. If he’s telling you it’s a gift, ask him to show you the paper.”
Mr. Sato opened the three-page document.
The house was named on the second page.
Under their signed separation settlement, Zain had given up his claims to it and to Alana’s estate. She’d agreed not to demand the entire loan at once while he moved out and arranged payments.
Her will left the house to me.
There were other papers behind it. Mr. Sato showed me the insurer’s confirmation, dated June twenty-second.
My name was beside the $380,000 policy.
Alana had made another arrangement for her child if the baby survived her. Because neither one had come home, the payment was to me.
I covered that part with my palm.
Zain leaned over the chair.
“I’m her husband.”
“You signed,” Mr. Sato said.
“I signed because she wouldn’t stop.”
“With your own adviser. You received copies.”
“I didn’t think she’d actually—”
He stopped.
Yael lifted her face.
“Actually what?”
He looked at his mother.
I went back to the last paragraph of Alana’s letter.
“Yael, he doesn’t own the nursery. He knows that. Whatever he promised you, he promised it after signing it away.”
The yellow room. The money. His hurry to talk to the insurer before anyone put these pages beside each other.
Alana wasn’t asking the other woman to give her husband back.
She was putting the bill in front of both of them.
I handed Mr. Sato the letter.
“Will you help me collect what he owes her?”
“Yes.”
Zain took a step toward me.
“We need to talk alone.”
I moved beside my daughter’s casket.
“You can talk here.”
His mother’s purse
He began with my health.
“You’ve barely slept. Helen, tell her. This is too much to decide today.”
Helen folded her tissue into her fist.
“She decided.”
Then he tried Alana.
“She changed her mind all the time. She was upset in May. We worked through things. She didn’t tear up a document, so now I’m supposed to lose my home?”
Mr. Sato said, “You reaffirmed the moving date in September.”
“I was keeping things calm.”
Yael stood.
“You told me you bought that house.”
“I paid bills there.”
“You said her mother kept trying to take it.”
He threw a hand toward me.
“Look what’s happening.”
I held out the key Alana gave me in June.
He looked away from it.
Yael started crying. I didn’t enjoy that as much as I’d expected. There wasn’t room in me to take on her disappointment, but I could leave it alone.
She came toward me.
“I didn’t know about the papers.”
“You knew about my daughter.”
She stopped.
“You said she’d moved on.”
Zain turned on her.
“Don’t do this. You knew she was pregnant. You knew we still lived together. Now you’re going to stand there and act shocked?”
His mother put her purse down on my chair.
“That’s enough.”
He turned to her at once.
“Thank you.”
She opened the purse and took out a small pouch.
Inside was a ring.
“My mother’s,” she said.
Mr. Hollister glanced toward Alana’s hands.
Zain’s mother held the ring between two fingers.
“I brought it because I thought I’d give it to you today. I thought you might want something from your grandmother to help you get through this.”
“Mom, the ring isn’t the point.”
“You told these people hers was mine.”
“I was trying to keep something of my wife’s.”
“You asked for it while that girl stood beside you.”
Yael moved away from him.
His mother put the ring back in the pouch.
Then she faced me.
“You called Thursday. I told you he couldn’t come to help because he was sick.”
Zain reached toward her elbow.
She pulled away.
“He was at my house getting ready to go out. I ironed his shirt.”
Helen made a sound beside me.
His mother began to cry.
“I told myself he needed a distraction. I told you he was sick.”
I wanted to give her something kind. A nod, perhaps. Something she could carry out of the room instead of what she’d brought into it.
I couldn’t.
“You let me call him all afternoon,” I said.
“Yes.”
Zain bent to pick up her purse.
“Come on. We’re done.”
She took it from him.
“No.”
He stood with his empty hand still reaching.
Yael pulled a key from her bag and dropped it on the chair.
It struck the metal frame.
“My apartment,” she said. “Give me yours.”
“You’re seriously doing this here?”
“Give me the key.”
He dug into his pocket. He threw it onto the seat.
She left his key where it was and walked out alone.
Zain turned back to me.
“You’re happy now. You got everybody to hate me.”
I took the receipt from the biscuit tin out of my wallet. I’d brought it for Mr. Hollister after Zain’s first message about the ring the night before.
I laid it beside his signed debt.
“Five hundred ninety dollars,” I said. “That was your half.”
He stared at the receipt.
“The ring stays.”
He sat down hard.
His mother stayed standing.
“You’ll repay Alana,” she said.
“I don’t have twenty-eight thousand sitting around.”
“You have the motorcycle.”
“I need the car.”
“You can sell it and buy something you can afford.”
He looked from her to Mr. Sato.
“And where am I supposed to live?”
She picked up her purse.
“You can ask your brother about his spare room.”
He began crying then. He bent forward and covered his face.
I went to my daughter.
Behind me, his mother opened the chapel door.
The family card
Zain didn’t leave immediately.
He tried once more with Mr. Sato, speaking low, as though a quieter price might be available.
Mr. Sato put the papers away.
“We’ll discuss repayment after the burial.”
“Without her,” Zain said.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
He pulled his keys from the chair and left.
His mother stayed long enough to stand beside Alana. She didn’t reach for me again.
Then the people he’d kept waiting came forward.
Alana’s coach put his hand on the casket and cried. Her friend from the clinic bent beside me.
“She covered my shifts when my mother was ill,” she said. “She’d tell me not to thank her, then steal my good pens.”
That got me. Of all the things to break on, I broke on pens.
Alana brought them home by accident and denied it with the clinic’s name printed against her teeth.
I laughed once, and it came out crooked.
Helen held me while I cried again.
Nobody hurried us.
Mr. Hollister moved the family card back to my chair. He took Yael’s abandoned program away.
“Would you like a few minutes?” he said.
“Yes.”
Helen walked the others toward the door.
I stood beside Alana and touched the ring on her hand.
“I’m taking care of it,” I said.
There were more things to say. Most of them began with sorry. I said them without an audience.
Then I kissed her forehead.
When I stepped back, Helen was waiting.
“Ready?”
“No.”
She took my hand anyway.
At the burial, Zain stood beside his mother, without his phone in his hand. When the service ended, he started toward me.
Helen moved between us.
I didn’t hear what he wanted.
I went home with my sister, carrying my daughter’s letter.
On Monday, Zain sent a message asking whether I’d reconsider collecting the loan.
I sent him the page with his signature.
Twenty-eight thousand seven hundred sixteen dollars
The house never went on the market.
Mr. Sato sent the agreement to the person Zain had contacted about listing it. There was nothing for Zain to sell.
He moved out on the date he’d agreed to. Helen and I were there when he put his keys on the kitchen counter.
He tried to keep one.
“The back door sticks,” he said. “You might need me.”
I held out my hand until he put that key down too.
His brother took him into the spare room. His mother didn’t give him her mother’s ring.
The motorcycle sold for $12,000.00.
That payment went toward his debt to Alana’s estate.
His car sold for $24,000.00. The remaining car loan took $7,283.58.
The other $16,716.42 came to the estate.
He brought the final payment to the house because I required the garage opener back, too.
Mr. Sato had confirmed the amount before I agreed to meet him. Helen stood beside me when he arrived.
Zain placed the payment and the opener on the counter.
“That’s everything.”
I checked the amount.
He looked toward the hall.
“Can I see the room?”
“No.”
The policy paid $380,000.00 to me. Zain received $0.00 from it.
The house stayed with me. Alana’s wedding ring stayed with her.
The funeral cost $11,260.00. I kept that receipt with the others, but I never sent it to him. I wasn’t having him tell anyone he buried my daughter.
Zain pushed the garage opener closer.
“Twenty-eight thousand seven hundred sixteen dollars and forty-two cents,” he said. “You got every penny.”
I put it in the biscuit tin.
“She did.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to someone who would have kept a hand under that mother’s elbow.
Family betrayals can take heartbreaking turns – read about a mother pushed aside in her own home and an ex who underestimated whose building he’d entered. There’s also a son’s shocking betrayal of his mother.
