My cousin Shawna played my grandmother’s recorded will on a boom box in her nursing home dayroom, loud enough for eleven residents, while Grandma sat three chairs away. “She can’t follow it anyway,” Shawna said, writing names next to a $190,000 house. Nobody had flipped the tape.
That house was where I lived from eleven to nineteen, and Grandma still asked me every visit whether anybody was watering the ferns on its porch.
Shawna had her power of attorney.
She also had a realtor’s card clipped to the top of her legal pad.
It was a Thursday, a little after four, when the dayroom at Briar Ridge fills up for the game shows.
Grandma was by the window with Bonnie, the lady from the room next to hers, a plate of graham crackers between them.
Somebody had left a jigsaw of a lighthouse half done on the card table, all the sky pieces still in the lid.
Shawna set the boom box on the television cart and switched off the game show without asking anybody.
Her little sister Eliana dragged two chairs into a half circle like it was book club.
“The family room’s booked,” Shawna said. “It’s ten minutes. Relax.”
“She’s right there,” I said.
“She’s been right there since April, Kara. She called me by my mom’s name on Sunday.”
The cassette was one of Grandpa’s old ones, with a strip of masking tape across it in Grandma’s printing.
Shawna had carried it out of a shoebox in Grandma’s closet down the hall that same Sunday.
She pressed play.
Grandma’s voice came out of that speaker fifteen years younger.
Strong. A little bossy.
“This is Miriam Pfister, it’s the twelfth of June, 2011, and I’m of sound mind, so nobody start.”
Two of the residents laughed.
Bonnie didn’t.
She looked at Grandma, then at the boom box, and put her cracker down.
The tape went through the house, the car, the savings at the credit union, the good china.
Shawna turned it UP for the jewelry.
“My rings go to my granddaughters, to share fair.”
Eliana leaned over to her sister and said, “The diamond’s still on her hand, right?”
“She doesn’t need it in here,” Shawna said. “Stuff walks off in these places.”
Grandma’s right hand closed over her left.
That was all she did.
Shawna clicked her pen and started a list down the margin.
House, sell, split.
Car, Eliana.
Ring, Eliana.
China, her.
Then she looked up at me.
“You already got Grandpa’s truck, so we’re square on you.”
“That truck had no brakes,” I said.
“Still a truck.”
Mr. Tse by the fish tank said, “Is this a radio program?”
“Family business, sir,” Eliana said.
“Then why’s it on in here?”
Nobody answered him.
The tape got to the part where Grandma said the house should go to whoever was still around for her at the end.
Shawna stopped it right there and tapped the pad with her pen.
“That’s me,” she said. “I’m here EVERY Sunday. Ask anybody.”
I come Tuesdays and Thursdays, straight from work, and I sit with her through supper.
In seven months I had NEVER once seen Shawna’s car in that lot.
“Every Sunday,” I said.
“Every single one. You’d know if you bothered with weekends.”
Eliana nodded like she’d been there too.
Bonnie said, “I’m here every day, honey. I’ve seen you one time.”
Shawna smiled at her the way you smile at a cashier.
“With respect, ma’am, you live in the memory wing.”
Bonnie’s mouth went flat.
Grandma didn’t move at all.
I stood up so fast my chair hit the wall.
“She can HEAR you,” I said. “She’s sitting RIGHT THERE.”
Shawna didn’t even drop her voice.
“Kara, she doesn’t know WHAT YEAR IT IS.”
The whole room heard it.
The only sound after that was the pump in the fish tank.
Then Grandma stood up.
She left her walker against the window.
She came down the row of chairs with a hand on each back, the way she used to cross her kitchen, one, two, three.
Shawna said, “Grandma, sit, we’re just going over—”
Grandma reached past her and popped the cassette door.
She turned the tape over in her fingers.
The other side had its own strip of masking tape, newer, the printing shakier.
“That side was for the lawyer,” Grandma said. “This side’s for me.”
“What is that,” Eliana said.
“Imran helped me with it,” Grandma said. “Nights. He stops in on his rounds when I can’t sleep.”
Imran runs the overnight shift here.
I’d met him exactly once, at ten o’clock in the parking lot, carrying two boxes of donuts in for the aides.
Shawna’s face went the color of the graham crackers.
She reached for the boom box.
Grandma got there first and pushed play.
Hiss.
A door closing.
Then a man’s voice, low and close to the microphone. “Red light’s on, Miriam. Go ahead.”
And my grandmother’s voice said, “It’s twenty to three in the morning. Visitors for May.”
Shawna lunged for the stop button.
Grandma laid her palm flat over every key on that machine.
“Sit down, honey,” she said. “You’re on this one.”
Visitors for May
Shawna didn’t sit. She stood there with her hand in the air over the cart.
The tape kept going.
“Sunday the third, nobody,” Grandma’s voice said. “Tuesday the fifth, Kara. She brought my reading glasses and stayed through the meatloaf. Thursday the seventh, Kara. Sunday the tenth, nobody.”
Grandma’s hand stayed on the keys.
“Tuesday the twelfth, Kara. Thursday the fourteenth, Kara. Sunday the seventeenth, nobody.”
Bonnie said, “Told you.”
I went and got my chair off the wall and set it back where it was, and I put Grandma’s walker beside it. It was the only thing I could think of to do with my hands.
“Thursday the twenty-first,” the tape said. “Before Kara came, a man from the doctor’s office came in with a clipboard. He asked me what year it was, and I told him. He asked me who the president was, and I told him what I think of him too.”
Two of the residents laughed again. Mr. Tse laughed the loudest.
“He said he’d send it to Shawna,” the tape said.
Grandma pressed stop.
She looked down at Shawna’s legal pad, then up at Shawna.
“What did he send you, honey?”
The ferns
Grandpa bought those cassettes in a ten-pack at the Kmart that closed. He used them to tape ball games off the radio for his brother in Fort Wayne.
The summer Grandma made side one, I was nineteen and packing. I’d got an apartment across town with a girl from work, and I had my clothes in grocery bags all over the kitchen floor.
Grandma set Grandpa’s recorder on the table between the salt and pepper.
“I’m not paying a lawyer to write down what I can say myself,” she said. “He can type it.”
So she said it. The house. The car. The credit union. The china. Her rings.
Then she said the part about whoever was still around for her at the end.
“Who’s that going to be?” I said.
“I’ll know,” she said. “I’ll keep track.”
She pressed stop and wrote on the masking tape in that square printing she used for everything. Then she went out on the porch and watered the ferns.
There were two of them, hanging from hooks Grandpa put in the porch ceiling the year they moved in. Boston ferns, big as bushel baskets. Every October before the first frost she carried them into the kitchen window, and every May she carried them back out.
The day I moved out, she took a key off her own ring and put it on mine.
“For the ferns,” she said. “In case I’m ever laid up.”
In April she missed the bottom porch step and broke her hip.
She went to Briar Ridge for rehab. Six weeks, they said. Shawna had the power of attorney from when Grandpa got sick, and Shawna signed the papers at the front desk, and six weeks was seven months now.
Shawna was the organized one. Shawna had the binder. At Grandpa’s funeral she had the folding chairs and the ham, and everybody said thank God for Shawna.
Every visit, Grandma asked me about the ferns.
Every visit, I said they looked good.
I hadn’t been to that house since April. I couldn’t stand to see it with nobody in it.
The key was still on my ring. It went into the dayroom with me every Tuesday and Thursday.
Now Shawna took the cassette out of the boom box, put it in her purse, and snapped the purse shut.
“Nothing you’d understand, Grandma,” she said.
Dwight
Grandma held out her hand for the tape. Shawna walked out with it.
Eliana went after her. She took the legal pad and left the boom box.
An aide came and turned the game show back on. Somebody won a dinette set.
I got Grandma back to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hand over her ring and didn’t say anything, and I didn’t know what to say to her either, so I said I’d be right back.
The administrator’s office is by the front desk. His name is Dwight, and he wears a lanyard with a little stuffed bear clipped to it.
I told him what happened. The boom box, the dayroom, the eleven people, what Shawna said to Bonnie.
He wrote on a form while I talked.
“I’m sorry that happened,” Dwight said. “That’s not how we want family business handled on the floor.”
“So you’ll talk to her.”
“Ms. Conley is the responsible party,” he said. “I can’t really discuss your grandmother’s care plan with you, Ms. Pfister. You’re not on the paperwork.”
“I’m here twice a week.”
“I know you are. Everybody knows you are.”
He turned the form so I could see what he’d written. Family conflict in dayroom. Resident agitated, left walker, ambulated without assist.
“She walked down three chairs,” I said. “By herself. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s a fall risk,” he said. “It goes in the file with the evaluation.”
“What evaluation?”
He looked at me like he’d assumed I knew.
“The cognitive one from May. Ms. Conley requested it. She requested the transfer based on it, and it was approved last week.”
“What transfer?”
Dwight pulled the stuffed bear off his lanyard and set it on the desk, and he didn’t look at me when he said it.
“Her move to the memory wing is Monday at ten.”
The porch
I drove to the house that night.
It was dark by six. The porch light was off, and the yard hadn’t been raked.
There was a sign in it.
It had the same realtor’s name as the card on Shawna’s legal pad, and somebody had hung a little red rider off the bottom that said UNDER CONTRACT.
I sat in my car in the driveway with the engine running for a long time.
Then I went up the steps, the bottom one where she fell, and the ferns were right there over my head.
Both of them were brown. All the way through. The baskets were so dry they swung when I touched them.
I’d told her they looked good on Tuesday.
There was a gray lockbox hanging off the front doorknob. Shawna never changed the locks. My key still worked.
The living room still had the couch and the recliner. The china cabinet in the dining room was empty. The good china, the cups with the gold rims, the gravy boat nobody was allowed to touch. Every shelf. I could see the clean rings in the dust where the plates had stood.
China, her.
There was a stack of papers on the kitchen counter, where Grandma kept the mail. Somebody had set a coffee mug on top of it.
It was a purchase agreement. One hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars. A couple from Kokomo with a baby on the way, according to the letter they’d paper-clipped to the front.
It was signed Shawna Conley, POA for Miriam Pfister. The title company was in town, on Third Street.
The closing date was written in by hand at the bottom.
The twentieth. Eleven days after the memory wing.
October
I called in to work the next morning and drove straight to Briar Ridge.
Grandma was dressed and sitting up in her chair. Bonnie was there with her coffee. When I came in, Bonnie got up and left without anybody asking her to.
“You went,” Grandma said.
I didn’t ask how she knew. She was looking at my face.
“Shawna kept the tape,” I said.
Grandma opened the drawer of her nightstand and took out a little black recorder, the kind with the buttons on top, and a cassette with no label at all.
“Imran made me a copy,” she said. “The first week. He said a person ought to keep a copy.”
She fast-forwarded it a long time, stopping and listening, then going again. Then she pressed play and set it on the bed between us.
“Sunday the fourth of October, nobody,” her voice said. “Imran drove by the house for me Saturday on his way home. He lives out past it on the county road. There’s a sign in my yard.”
A pause on the tape. The door, Imran’s chair creaking.
“Tuesday the sixth, Kara. I asked her about my ferns. She said they look good.”
Another pause.
“They’re dead, I bet,” Grandma’s voice said. “She hasn’t been. If she’d been, she’d have seen the sign.”
Grandma pressed stop.
I sat there on the end of her bed in my work clothes.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know you are.” She put the recorder back in the drawer. “I wasn’t going to say anything to Shawna until I had a ride.”
“A ride where?”
She held up her left hand, the one with the ring on it, and turned it so the diamond caught the window.
“The credit union opens at nine on Saturdays,” she said. “Not in that truck.”
Sunday
The credit union has a notary named Anjali who did Grandma’s car title in 2015. Grandma asked for her by name.
Grandma signed a revocation of the power of attorney at Anjali’s desk in front of two tellers. She wrote out her own address in that square printing. Anjali stamped it and made four copies.
I drove one to the title company on Third Street and slid it through the mail slot because they were closed. I left one with the front desk at Briar Ridge, for Dwight. I mailed one to Shawna, certified.
Grandma kept the last one in her purse.
On Sunday, at twenty after one, Shawna came. Bonnie said later it was the second time.
She came straight down the hall to Grandma’s room. Eliana was behind her.
“Do you know what you did?” Shawna said. “Do you have any idea? The title company called me at HOME on a Sunday. I have buyers, Grandma. I have a contract. They can sue. They have a baby coming.”
Grandma sat in her chair with her purse on her knees.
“And you.” Shawna turned on me. “You drove an eighty-six-year-old woman with a broken hip to a bank to sign legal papers she can’t read. That’s what this is. I’ll have Dwight in here in two minutes.”
“Dwight has a copy,” I said.
“Do you know what this place COSTS?” Shawna said. “Ninety-two hundred dollars a month. Her savings are gone in March. Somebody had to sell that house, and nobody else was going to do it. I signed the admission papers. I’m the one on the hook. Me. Not you, with your Tuesdays and Thursdays and your suppers.”
“Then why’d you split it?” Eliana said.
Shawna stopped.
“On the pad,” Eliana said. “House, sell, split. If it was for this place, why’d you split it?”
“Because I EARNED some of it,” Shawna said. “I’ve done every single thing for her since Grandpa. The binder. The bills. I put money down on a condo off that house, Eliana. I’ve already put money DOWN.”
Nobody said anything.
“Who’s going to live with her?” Shawna said. “That’s what they’re going to ask you. She can’t go home to an empty house with that hip. Who’s going to do it? You?”
“Me,” I said.
Shawna looked at me a long time. Then she laughed, once, and picked up her purse.
“You’ll last a month,” she said.
She went out. She didn’t take the cassette out of her purse. I never saw it again.
Eliana stayed. She pulled Bonnie’s chair up next to Grandma and sat down in it.
Visitors for December
My landlord kept the deposit and the last month, eleven hundred dollars, for breaking the lease.
I sleep in my old room. It’s twenty-five minutes further to work, and I’ve stopped seeing anybody on Saturdays because Saturdays are the grocery store and Grandma’s hair.
Dwight called once to say the memory wing bed had been released. He said he was glad. He sounded like he meant it.
The ferns weren’t dead all the way. I cut them back to the crown with Grandma’s kitchen scissors and carried them in before the first frost, and now there are little green fists coming up in both baskets in the kitchen window.
Eliana comes the second Sunday. She brought the gravy boat back in a towel and set it on the table and didn’t say where it had been.
Thursday night after supper, Grandma had me put the boom box on the counter, between the salt and the pepper.
She put a fresh tape in, one from the old ten-pack. She sat down and folded her hands with the ring on them.
“Is the red light on?” she said.
“Red light’s on, Grandma.”
She leaned toward the machine.
“It’s the third of December,” she said. “Visitors.”
If someone you love keeps asking the same small question every visit, go and look before you answer it next time.
Family secrets have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moment – read “My Brother-in-Law Knew About My Green Towel Before I Said a Word” and “I Was Sixteen In The Kitchen The Night My Father Signed For Their $6,400”. And when money and family collide, thirty-eight missed calls can tell quite a story.
