My mother spent a year telling our whole church my father was losing his mind, and when I asked what she’d seen she said, “You don’t live with him, so you don’t get a vote.” She needed me to drive them to the credit union so he’d sign $214,000 over to her. I drove. The banker found something first.
Fifty-one years they’d been married, and most of that money came from thirty-four years of Dad on a forklift at the bottling plant.
It was the rest of their lives.
Mom had the paperwork ready a week early.
She called me Sunday night. Three times.
“He drove to the pharmacy and called me from the parking lot because he couldn’t remember why he went,” she said. “He’s going, Stacy. I need to be able to pay the bills when he can’t.”
I asked Dad about it on the phone Monday.
He said, “Your mother says a lot of things.” Then he asked how my tomatoes were doing.
That was the whole conversation.
Tuesday at 10:15 I pulled into their driveway in Muncie.
Mom was already on the porch in her good camel coat with a manila folder under her arm.
Dad came out behind her with his reading glasses on a cord and locked the door himself. Then he checked it. Twice.
Mom gave me a look like, see?
He checks every door twice. He has since I was six.
The credit union gave us a desk in the back with a woman named Rekha, a dish of butterscotch candies, and a photo of somebody’s sailboat taped to the side of her monitor.
Mom did the talking.
“My husband is having memory problems,” she said. “We need to add me as power of attorney on everything. Today, if we can.”
Dad took a butterscotch and unwrapped it and said nothing.
Rekha asked for both IDs and started typing.
She typed for a long time.
Then she stopped and scrolled. Up. Down. Up again.
“Mrs. Yancey,” she said. “Before we add anyone, I have to confirm which accounts are included. I’m showing the joint savings, the joint checking, and a third account.”
“There’s no third account,” Mom said.
“It’s an individual savings. Opened fourteen months ago. In your name only.”
Mom’s hand went flat on the folder.
“That’s a mistake,” she said.
Rekha didn’t look at her. She looked at Dad.
“Mr. Yancey, I’m required to ask this. Are you aware of transfers from your joint savings into that account?”
Dad said, “How much.”
Not really a question. The same way he used to ask the guy at the tire place.
Rekha turned her screen a few inches toward him.
“Sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars,” she said. “Twenty-two transfers.”
FOURTEEN MONTHS.
The exact stretch of time she’d been telling the ladies at church he was slipping.
I looked over at my mother.
She was standing.
I never saw her get up. One second she was in the chair with her folder, and the next the chair was shoved back and she was a full step from the desk, then another, her purse strap wound around her fist so tight the leather creaked.
“Thomas, we will talk about this at home,” she said.
“Sit down, Marlys.”
“I am NOT DOING THIS in front of a stranger.”
Rekha cleared her throat.
“There’s one more thing I’m obligated to mention, since a power of attorney was requested,” she said. “The individual account lists a payable-on-death beneficiary.”
“That is PRIVATE,” Mom said.
“It isn’t your husband,” Rekha said. “And it isn’t your daughter.”
Nobody moved.
Dad set the butterscotch wrapper on the desk and smoothed it flat with his thumb, the way he does with gas receipts.
“I know,” he said.
Mom stopped backing up.
“I’ve known since the March statement,” Dad said. “The paper one. You forgot they still mail me the paper one.”
She looked at me. Like I’d done it. Like I’d planned the whole morning.
“Stacy, take me home,” she said. “Your father is confused. You can SEE he’s confused.”
“He’s not confused, Mom.”
“He doesn’t KNOW what he’s talking about.”
Dad didn’t even turn around.
He kept his eyes on Rekha.
“Read her the name,” he said. “I want my daughter to hear it from somebody who isn’t me.”
Rekha looked at the screen. Then at my mother, who was halfway to the glass doors now with one hand already out for the handle.
“The beneficiary is listed as a Frank Fahey,” Rekha said.
Mom’s hand stopped on the glass.
Dad folded the wrapper in half.
“Frank Fahey,” he said. “So THAT’S what he’s calling himself now.”
Rekha’s desk
“Who is Frank Fahey?” I said.
I said it to Rekha, because she had the screen. She looked at Dad.
Dad put the folded wrapper in his shirt pocket.
“He was Frankie Santos when your mother married him,” he said. “Nineteen seventy-two. It lasted eleven months.”
“It was ANNULLED,” Mom said from the door.
“It was a divorce, Marlys. I paid the man who typed it.”
I was forty-eight years old, and nobody had ever told me my mother had a husband before my father. Not her, not him, not one aunt at one Thanksgiving.
Mom pushed the glass door open and went out into the parking lot. She didn’t run. She walked fast with her chin up, the way she walks out of a church council meeting that voted wrong.
She got as far as my car.
I had the keys.
She pulled the passenger handle once, and then she stood there with her purse against her stomach and stared at the building like it owed her money.
Rekha folded her hands on the desk.
“Mr. Yancey, would you like to put a hold on the joint savings while this gets sorted out?”
“Not yet,” Dad said. “Print me the transfers. All twenty-two. With the dates on them.”
The printer behind her started up.
Dad looked at me over his glasses. He didn’t look confused. He looked like a man at the end of a long shift who could see the time clock.
“Go sit with her,” he said. “I’ve got one more thing to sign, and she can’t be in the room for it.”
The blue suit
There’s a picture in the upstairs hallway of my parents’ house, between the bathroom and the linen closet.
June 1975. The steps of the county courthouse. Dad in a tie he borrowed from his brother, Mom in a pale blue skirt suit with a carnation pinned on the lapel. No veil. No church.
When I was little I asked her why she didn’t wear a white dress like the brides in the catalog.
“We didn’t have money for a church wedding,” she said. “And your father didn’t care either way.”
Dad never said a word about it. He just straightened that frame every night on his way to bed, the way he checks the doors.
That was my parents. Mom talked. Dad straightened things.
Mom ran the checkbook for fifty-one years. Paid the bills, kept the budget, knew what the furnace cost in 1994 and what it would cost again. Dad worked first shift at the plant, came home smelling like cardboard and diesel, and handed her his check. When the credit union went online she moved everything to her laptop. Dad kept getting paper statements. He said he liked to hold a thing he was reading.
He liked to hold everything. Over his workbench in the garage there’s a shelf of Folgers cans, one for every year, full of gas receipts he flattens with his thumb and drops in. Mom called it hoarding. Last fall she started calling it a symptom.
Wednesdays were Mom’s. Quilting circle at the church, nine to three, for as long as I can remember. She’d come home with a casserole somebody owed her and all the news.
The news, this past year, was Dad.
I heard it first at Easter, from Carmen Barrera, who has been my mother’s best friend since I was in Girl Scouts and runs the prayer chain like air traffic control.
“We’re all praying for your father,” Carmen said, in the coffee line after the service. “His memory. Your mother is a saint, Stacy. A saint.”
And I’ll be honest. I said, “I’ve been noticing a few things too.”
I hadn’t. I said it because Carmen was looking at me like a daughter who didn’t know her own father was going, and I didn’t want to be that daughter.
Two weeks later, at Sunday dinner, Mom set her fork down and said, “Your father has agreed it’s time.”
Dad reached into his pocket and slid the Buick keys across the table to her. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even sigh. He went back to his pot roast.
It was the saddest thing I had ever seen him do.
That was April. The month after the March statement.
So that’s how it was. Mom had the car, the checkbook, the church and the story. Dad had the garage and the paper. And when Mom needed somebody to drive the two of them to sign away the rest of their lives, she called the daughter who’d been noticing things.
They still have a landline, by the way. One in the kitchen, one extension upstairs on Mom’s nightstand. When I talked to Dad that Monday I heard the little click halfway through, and I didn’t think anything of it. Mom always listens on the extension.
I walked out to the parking lot with my keys in my hand.
Mom didn’t look at me. She looked at the doors.
I unlocked the car. She got in the back seat, not the front.
The back seat
Dad came out ten minutes later with a white credit union envelope folded lengthwise in his jacket pocket. He got in the front beside me and buckled up and didn’t say a thing about it.
I pulled out onto the road.
Mom already had her phone to her ear.
“Carmen,” she said. “It’s me. No, it didn’t go. He made a scene. In front of the girl at the desk. He brought up Frankie, Carmen. From FIFTY YEARS AGO.”
I could hear Carmen’s voice from the front seat. Not the words. Just the pitch, like a kettle.
“I know,” Mom said. “I know. That’s what I told her.”
Dad looked out the window at the Dollar General.
“He’s confused,” Mom said. “He’s been confused all morning. Stacy won’t see it.”
I turned my head a little toward the back. “Carmen, he isn’t confused. There’s sixty-one thousand dollars in an account he didn’t know…”
“Don’t you DARE,” Mom said, and she put the phone against her coat.
Then she put it back to her ear and said, sweet as a hymn, “No, that was Stacy. She’s upset. Everybody’s upset.”
She listened for a while.
“Well, you’re the one who told me to open it,” she said. “You SAID. A woman needs something in her own name when a man starts to go. You said that in my kitchen.”
So Carmen knew about the account.
I don’t know what I’d thought. That Mom did all of this alone, maybe. That the prayer chain was a rumor that got away from her. But Carmen had stood at my mother’s counter fourteen months ago and told her to start moving money, and then stood in the Easter coffee line and called her a saint.
Mom hung up.
Nobody talked for a mile. Dad took the folded wrapper out of his shirt pocket and turned it over in his fingers.
“Now you’ve done it,” Mom said to the back of my head. “Now Carmen thinks you’re in on it with him.”
“In on what, Mom?”
She didn’t answer that.
We turned onto their street. Mom leaned forward between the seats, close enough that I could smell her hairspray.
“Carmen’s coming over,” she said. “We had lunch planned. For after.”
The manila folder
Carmen’s white Malibu pulled in behind us before I had the car in park.
She got out carrying a chicken and rice casserole in a quilted carrier and a bottle of sparkling cider with a curly ribbon on the neck.
For after.
She hugged my mother on the porch for a long time. Over Mom’s shoulder she looked at Dad the way you’d look at a dog that had bitten somebody once.
Dad went straight to the garage. He didn’t take his coat off.
In the kitchen Carmen set the cider in the fridge and the casserole on the stove and started opening cabinets like she lived there. She knew where the trivets were. She knew where the good serving spoon was.
“Your mother has carried this by herself,” she said to me. “You need to understand that.”
“Carmen, I was there. Dad knew about the account since March. He’s not…”
“I know about the account.” She didn’t even turn around from the drawer. “I’m the one who sat with her at the computer. When my husband started to go, he hid our checkbook in the freezer. In the freezer, Stacy. Behind the peas.”
“Dad doesn’t hide anything. He keeps receipts.”
“And your father,” Carmen said, “hid a whole marriage from this congregation for fifty years. Frankie Santos. Did you know that? We had to hear it from your mother. And you’re worried about her little nest egg.”
That was how they’d done it. Every single thing Mom had done, Carmen had a reason for, and every reason was Dad.
Mom sat at the table with her coat still on. She looked small and tired and wronged, the exact way she must have looked on Wednesdays for fourteen months.
I didn’t argue anymore. I’d tried once in the car and it bought my mother a better story.
I said I’d left my phone in the car.
I hadn’t. It was in my back pocket. I just needed to be somewhere they weren’t.
The manila folder was lying on the back seat where Mom had dropped it.
I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and opened it on my knees.
On top were the power of attorney forms, with little yellow sign-here flags on every page where Dad’s name went. She’d filled in everything else herself, in blue ink, in her church-bulletin printing.
Under those was a glossy brochure for a memory care place over in Anderson. A garden on the cover. Two old men playing checkers. Across the top, in my mother’s hand: Thurs 1:00 tour. Bring his meds list.
Under the brochure was a printed email from a realtor.
Offer accepted, 2BR/2BA condo, Fort Myers FL. Buyers: Marlys Yancey and Frank Fahey. Closing contingent on funds.
The closing date was underlined twice.
The tour was Thursday at one. The condo closed the Friday after.
The Folgers cans
The garage door was up a foot. I ducked under it with the folder.
Dad was at the workbench under the shelf of coffee cans. He had the white envelope open, and the printout from Rekha was laid out on the bench in two rows, smoothed flat, the way he does everything.
Twenty-two transfers.
“Look at the dates,” he said.
I looked. I didn’t know what I was looking for.
“Wednesdays,” he said. “Every one of them. Quilting.”
He reached up without looking and took down this year’s can. He knew exactly where to go in it. He pulled out a receipt from the pharmacy on the bypass, June, a Wednesday, 10:52 a.m. Blood pressure pills, a pack of gum.
“This is the day,” he said. “The day your mother tells everybody I forgot why I went.”
“Did you?”
“I went for my pills. Her car was across the road at the Super 8. Parked around the side, where you’d park if you didn’t want anybody from church to see it.” He laid the receipt next to the printout. “I called her. She said she was at quilting. So I said I couldn’t remember why I came, and I hung up.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because the other thing I had to say, I didn’t want to say on a phone.”
He took his glasses off and let them hang on the cord.
“Then the March statement came,” he said. “Twenty thousand short, give or take. I took it to that girl, Rekha, by myself, on the bus. I asked her what happens if somebody wants power of attorney on a man. She said they go through every account, out loud, with both people sitting there.”
“So in April you gave Mom the keys.”
“So in April I gave your mother the keys,” he said. “Then she’d need you to drive her.”
I stood there with the folder against my chest.
“You could’ve just told me, Dad.”
“I heard you at Easter,” he said. He didn’t say it mean. “Carmen told your mother, and your mother told me at supper. You’d been noticing things.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I’d said it to a woman in a coffee line to look like a good daughter, and it had come home to his supper table.
“And Monday,” he said. “When I asked about your tomatoes. She was on the upstairs phone. I heard it click.”
“What did you sign at the desk? After I went out.”
“I moved my half. A hundred and seven thousand, into one in my name. Yours is on the death line.” He shrugged. “Hers is hers. Let her have it.”
Then I put the folder on the bench and opened it to the brochure.
He read it. He read the handwriting at the top twice. Then he laid it on the bench beside the receipt and smoothed it flat with his thumb, corner to corner, the way he does with gas receipts.
“Thursday,” he said. “She was going to have me pick out a room.”
Thursday at one
Mom and Carmen were at the kitchen table when I came in. The cider was back out, still sealed, sweating on a dish towel.
I set the brochure in front of Carmen. Then the realtor’s email on top of it, so the names faced her.
Carmen read it. Her lips moved on Frank Fahey.
“Where did you get that,” Mom said. “That’s MINE. That was in my folder.”
I took my phone out and dialed the number on the back of the brochure and put it on speaker on the table.
“Hang that up,” Mom said. “Stacy. Hang that up right now.”
A woman answered and said the name of the place.
“I’m calling about Thursday’s tour,” I said. “For Thomas Yancey.”
“Oh, yes. Mrs. Yancey set that up,” the woman said. “One o’clock. I have the intake notes she gave us over the phone. Wandering at night, some aggression, can’t manage his own finances anymore. And we have a second contact on file in case we can’t reach Mrs. Yancey. A Mr. Frank Fahey? Is that still the best number for him?”
Carmen put her hand over her mouth.
“Cancel it,” I said, and hung up.
Mom stood up so fast her chair hit the cabinet.
“You don’t understand ANYTHING,” she said. “You were six years old when you decided he was a saint, and you never once looked at what I got out of the deal. Fifty-one years I ironed that man’s work shirts. Fifty-one years I made that check stretch. I wore a BLUE SUIT at the courthouse because the pastor back then wouldn’t put a divorced girl in white, and your father stood there and let me, and he’s been letting me pay for it ever since. You think I don’t know what that photo is? He straightens it every night so I’ll see him do it.”
“Marlys,” Carmen said.
“Frankie called me two years ago. After his wife died. He found me on Facebook. He remembered my birthday, Carmen. He remembered the DAY. Your husband ever remember yours?”
“You told us he got rough with you,” Carmen said. “Thomas. You told the whole circle he got rough.”
“I said he COULD. They get that way at the end. You told me so yourself.”
“I told you about mine.”
“It’s a NICE place,” Mom said, and she wasn’t talking to Carmen anymore. She was talking to me. “It has a garden. He’d have been looked after. I’d have made sure. I wasn’t going to just leave him.”
“With Frank’s number on his file,” I said.
She looked at me for a long time.
“I’d have taken you,” she said. “Florida has room. You were always on my side, Stacy. Always. Since you were little.”
I didn’t answer.
Carmen stood up. She took the cider off the dish towel and put it back in her bag, and she left the casserole on the stove, and she walked out without hugging anybody. Her car started in the driveway and backed out slow.
Mom looked at the door. Then she picked up the kitchen phone.
Dad was in the doorway from the garage. I don’t know how long he’d been there. He still had his coat on.
“Use the one upstairs, Marlys,” he said. “You know where it is.”
She went up the stairs. A minute later the extension clicked.
Tuesday, 10:15
Three weeks later I pulled into their driveway at 10:15 on a Tuesday.
His driveway.
Mom is in Florida. She took her account and her half of the joint the morning after, and the Buick, and her good camel coat. She sent me one text from a Georgia rest stop that said I’m sure he’s told you his version. I haven’t answered it. I don’t know yet if I’m going to.
Carmen doesn’t run the prayer chain anymore. I heard that from a woman at the grocery, not from Carmen.
Dad bought himself a used Ranger off a guy from the plant. But he called Monday and asked me to come anyway, because the credit union wants my signature on a card for the new account, and he wanted to go together.
He came out on the porch in his tan jacket with his reading glasses on the cord.
The hallway picture is gone. I saw it last week, the square of brighter wallpaper between the bathroom and the linen closet. I didn’t ask where it went.
He locked the door himself. Then he checked it. Twice.
I didn’t give anybody a look.
He got in the passenger side and dug in his jacket pocket and held out a butterscotch, still wrapped.
“From the dish,” he said. “I took two last time.” He buckled up. “Your tomatoes. Did they come in or not?”
If somebody you love has suddenly got a whole church worried about them, go sit with them a while and ask what they’ve seen.
For more tangled family secrets and moments when the people closest to you rewrite the story, read “Our Son Calls Her Aunt Ren. I Send $300 Every Payday to Cover Her”, “I Still Carry Mom’s Old House Key. She Sat Me by the Kitchen”, and “I Told His Mother I Was the One Who Couldn’t Have Kids”.
