My oldest customer’s son stood in the middle of the nursing home dayroom, pointed at me, and said, “You’ve been working on my mother for thirty years so you could rob her blind.” He meant the $186,000 lottery slip she’d pushed into my hand that morning. Nobody in that room knew what she’d written on the back of it.
Half the residents in that room get their pills from my counter, and a pharmacist accused of robbing an old woman doesn’t keep her license for long.
Frances Schaefer has been bringing her prescriptions to me since my second year owning the store in Sedalia.
Twenty-nine years, if anybody’s counting.
Frances was.
She’s eighty-six now.
That Thursday I was dropping the week’s blister packs at the nurses’ station when she waved me over from her chair by the fish tank.
“Gabby. Come here before I lose my nerve.”
She had a lottery slip folded in half in her fist.
Yael, the aide on her hall, buys her one every Monday at the gas station out by the highway. Two dollars, same numbers since the Carter administration.
This week five of them came up, plus the bonus ball.
Yael had checked it on her phone three times and then gone to sit in the break room with her head between her knees.
“It’s yours,” Frances said.
I laughed, because I figured she was teasing me.
She wasn’t.
She closed both of her hands over mine and squeezed until her rings dug into my knuckles.
“I did NOT ask for this, Frances. I don’t want it.”
“I know you don’t. That’s why it’s yours.”
“Your family is going to…”
“Don’t read the back in here,” she said. “You’ll cry, and these people talk.”
I put it in my cardigan pocket without unfolding it.
I’d bring it back Monday and talk some sense into her.
Noel showed up at 2:15.
Somebody had called him. To this day I don’t know who.
He came through the double doors in a golf shirt with his daughter Leah right behind him, and Leah already had her phone up.
The dayroom was packed. Thursday afternoons are bingo.
By the window, Jorge kept working on his jigsaw puzzle, a lighthouse with most of the sky still missing.
Noel didn’t go to his mother first.
He walked straight across the room to me.
That’s when he said it, the part about thirty years and robbing her blind, loud enough that the bingo caller quit calling.
Then he held out his hand, palm up.
“Give it here.”
“Noel, she handed it to me this morning. I tried to give it back.”
“Sure you did.”
“I’m going to give it back.”
“Then do it. RIGHT NOW. In front of everybody.”
My hand went to my pocket and stayed there.
I still can’t tell you why. Maybe because she’d asked me to wait.
He saw it.
“She was diagnosed in August,” he said, more to the room than to me. “Early dementia. It’s in her chart. A woman with a diagnosis can’t sign away a dime, and you know that, because you’ve read her goddamn chart.”
Frances said, “I got a diagnosis of you in 1962 and I kept you anyway.”
Two of the ladies at the bingo table laughed, then looked down at their cards.
Noel’s ears went red.
He turned all the way around so he was facing them instead of her.
“Ask her what she charged MY mother for pills all those years,” he said. “Ask her how a little drugstore stayed open when the chain store came in by the highway. She’s been squeezing old people in this town since before half of you moved in here.”
A woman in a purple tracksuit set her dauber down.
Somebody’s hearing aid whistled.
Shit. Half of them believed him.
Dung, the director, came out of his office with his reading glasses still on his nose.
“Mr. Schaefer, let’s take this somewhere private.”
“No. Everybody stays. I want witnesses.”
“Dad, I’ve got it,” Leah said. “I’m recording.”
Noel pulled out his own phone and held the screen toward me like a badge.
“I called the lottery office from the car. You know what they told me? Whoever signs the back owns the ticket. So if you put your name on it, Gabrielle, that’s THEFT, and the sheriff’s office is about four minutes from here.”
“I HAVEN’T SIGNED ANYTHING,” I said.
It came out louder than I meant it to.
Jorge looked up from the lighthouse.
“Then you won’t mind,” Noel said.
I took the slip out of my pocket.
The fold had gone soft from my hand.
He snatched it before I’d even held it out, and the corner bent back against my thumbnail.
Frances said, “Noel.”
He didn’t look at her.
“Noel. Look at your mother.”
He did, finally.
“You wanted witnesses,” she said. “Well, you’ve got ALL of them. Turn it over and read them the back.”
“Mom, I’m not doing this here. I’m taking it to the lottery office…”
“OUT LOUD. EVERY line. Since you drove all this way.”
Leah stepped in closer with the phone.
Noel flipped the slip over.
I hadn’t seen the back yet either.
It was covered edge to edge in Frances’s blue ballpoint, columns of it, the writing so small it ran right into the barcode.
Noel’s lips moved on the first line before any sound came out.
“Ninety-seven,” he said.
Then nothing.
His thumb started down the first column and stopped halfway.
Frances folded her hands in her lap.
“Keep going, honey,” she said. “Nobody in here’s in any hurry.”
B-nine
He didn’t keep going.
I was close enough to read it over his forearm, so I read it for him, to myself.
97 Jan Humulin 38.00 G
Feb Humulin 38.00 Syringes 9.40 G
Mar Humulin 38.00 G
Down the first column and into the second, month after month, every line ending in a G with a circle around it. Drug names I’d typed onto labels ten thousand times. Prices nobody has paid for those drugs since the Clinton administration.
I knew those numbers. I’d written most of them myself, in a green ledger under my register.
Noel’s thumb sat over the bottom of the second column. He folded the slip back along the old crease.
“It’s a list,” he said to the room. “A confused woman’s grocery list. That’s all this proves.”
“Read the rest,” Frances said.
He put the slip in the pocket of his golf shirt and patted it.
I took a step toward him. Leah’s phone swung around to follow me.
“You get that?” Noel said. “She’s coming at me.”
“I got it, Dad.”
Dung said, “Mr. Schaefer, that ticket belongs to…”
“My mother. And I’ve been her power of attorney since August, so it’s in the right pocket.”
He bent and kissed Frances on the top of her head. She turned her face toward the fish tank.
Then he walked out the double doors, and the bingo caller said, “B-nine.”
The green book
The man I bought the store from in 1996 left me a cash drawer that stuck and a green ledger under the register.
Half of Sedalia still ran a tab in that book and paid on the first of the month. I kept it because I couldn’t afford to lose half of Sedalia.
Frances came in that January, three weeks after her husband’s funeral, in a black wool coat with the price tag still hanging off the sleeve. He’d always been the one who picked up the prescriptions. She didn’t know what insulin cost.
It cost thirty-eight dollars. She had eleven and some change in a coin purse.
“My widow’s check is tangled up in some office in Jefferson City,” she said. “And his insurance money is with Noel. He’s investing it for me. It’ll be straight by spring.”
I opened the green book and wrote SCHAEFER at the top of a clean page.
“Pay me when it’s straight.”
It never got straight. Every month she came in and asked, “What do I owe, Gabby?” and every month I said, “It’s on the book.” Then she’d take out her checkbook register and write the amount down in blue ballpoint, tiny, in a column where there was nothing to subtract it from.
The man before me had one rule about the book, and I kept it. Whoever carried the bag out the door signed the line. Husbands, grandkids, the boy from the Methodist church who drove for shut-ins. Everybody signed.
The chain store opened out by the highway in 1999. That was the year I took a second mortgage on my house. I never put those two things next to Frances’s page, and I’m not going to start now.
In 2006 the Medicare drug plan came in, her copays dropped to a few dollars, and she paid them in cash from then on. I boxed the green book with the 2006 taxes and carried it to the basement. I never added up her page. I didn’t want to know what it came to.
That Thursday night I sat in my car behind the store with my hand in my empty cardigan pocket.
He’d kept his thumb on the bottom of that column the whole time.
Thirty-eight seconds
Leah posted it Friday morning.
Thirty-eight seconds. It started on Noel’s finger pointing at me and ended on the sheriff’s office being four minutes away. It stopped before I ever took the slip out of my pocket. Under it she’d written, This woman took my 86 y/o grandma’s lottery ticket. Sedalia please share. With a heart.
By noon it had nine thousand views.
Tamika has run my register for eleven years. She read the comments on her break, then put her phone face down on the counter and left it there the rest of the day.
Three transfer requests came over the fax before close. One was the Baptist preacher’s wife, who I once drove to Columbia for her husband’s bypass.
“I’m calling every one of them back,” Tamika said.
“Don’t. It’ll look like I’m begging.”
“Then I’ll beg. I’ve got the voice for it.”
At six I called Noel. I told him I’d sign anything he wanted saying I had no claim to that ticket.
“You don’t have a claim,” he said. “You never did. Sign whatever you want, Gabrielle. It doesn’t change what’s in my pocket.”
He hung up.
Monday morning a man named Sundberg called from the Board of Pharmacy. A complaint had been filed. Exploitation of a vulnerable adult. He was polite about it, which was worse. He wanted every record I had on Frances Schaefer, back as far as I had them.
Monday afternoon I took the blister packs to the home, and Dung met me at the double doors with his hands already out for them.
“Mr. Schaefer’s asked, as her power of attorney, that you not have contact with his mother.”
“Dung, I’ve filled your blood pressure pills for nine years.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why it’s me telling you.”
The basement
The box said 2006 TAXES in my handwriting, under a broken box fan.
The green book was at the bottom, gone soft at the corners.
Frances had four pages. Her name at the top in my capitals, then nine years of my handwriting, month by month. Humulin. Syringes. Later the metformin, the water pill, the eye drops. Down the right side, the signatures.
F. Schaefer. F. Schaefer. F. Schaefer.
March 1997. N. Schaefer.
April 1997. N. Schaefer.
May 1997. N. Schaefer.
I could almost see him. A man in his thirties in a golf shirt, even then, in a hurry to get back on the highway, signing without looking at the total.
Three months running, her son had carried her insulin out of my store on credit. The same spring her husband’s insurance money was sitting with him.
I ran her pages through the adding machine twice. Sixteen thousand, eight hundred eighty dollars and forty cents. The tape curled off the counter onto the floor.
At ten after nine somebody knocked on the back door.
It was Yael, still in her scrubs, holding her phone against her chest with both hands.
“I can’t be here,” she said. “Dung would fire me.”
“Then come in where nobody can see you.”
She stepped inside and held out the phone.
“Wednesday night she had me take a picture of it. Front and back. She said her son would eat it before he let anybody read it.”
She turned the screen around.
Yael’s phone
“She said you should read it somewhere you could cry,” Yael said. “So I figured here.”
She’d photographed it flat on Frances’s chenille bedspread. I spread my fingers on the screen until the back of the slip filled it.
Frances had copied her checkbook register onto a piece of paper the size of a playing card. Nine years of it. I laid the green book open beside the phone and checked her against me, line by line, while Yael held the phone still.
She didn’t miss a month. She didn’t miss a cent.
At the bottom of the second column, right where Noel’s thumb had been, she’d drawn a line and added it up.
Gabby carried me 16,880.40. Never sent one bill.
The adding machine tape was still on the floor where it had landed. Same number.
“He read ‘ninety-seven’ and stopped,” Yael said. “He knew what came after it.”
Under the total, crammed so tight against the barcode I had to turn the phone sideways, there were three more lines.
Feb 97. Noel. 40,000. His daddy’s insurance. For the car lot. “One year, Mom.”
Paid back: 0.
I looked from the screen to the green book. February, the money. March, April, May, N. Schaefer, in a steady hand.
Then her initials, and Wednesday’s date, and one last line above them.
This ticket is for Gabby. Noel had his.
Dung’s office
I sent Sundberg everything he’d asked for, plus one more page. Then I called Dung and told him to tell Noel I’d sign a disclaimer in front of witnesses, Thursday at 2:15, in his office, with Frances in the room.
Noel was there at two.
The slip was in his shirt pocket again. Leah had her phone up again. Frances came in on her walker with Yael beside her and took the chair by the window.
“Let’s get this done,” Noel said. “I’ve got a lawyer in Lee’s Summit who wants that paper by five. Sign it and you can go back to your little store and see who’s still coming in.”
I put the green book on Dung’s desk, open to March 1997, with a printout of Yael’s picture beside it.
“Leah,” I said. “Would you read March.”
“She’s not reading anything.”
Leah was already leaning over the desk. “Humulin. Thirty-eight dollars.” She stopped. “Dad. That’s how you sign my birthday cards.”
“So I picked up her medicine. That’s what a son does. You want a medal?”
“Read her the bottom of the picture,” Frances said.
Leah read it out loud. The car lot. The forty thousand. The zero.
Noel talked for a long time after that.
It was a loan. His dad would have wanted him to have the lot. He’d have paid it back if the bank hadn’t pulled his floor plan in ’08. She’d had a roof. She’d had her pills. She’d had HER, he said, and pointed at me like that settled it. And what was this anyway, a grudge in ballpoint from a woman with a diagnosis, did anybody here actually think a judge would…
“You told me Grandpa didn’t leave anything,” Leah said. “You told me that’s why you had to take the loan.”
He stopped.
“I’m still recording, Dad. I never stopped.”
I slid my paper across the desk. Tamika had typed it that morning. I gave up any claim to the slip, forever, on one condition: it went back to Frances in this room, she signed it herself in front of Dung and Yael, and the money went into an account with only her name on it.
“If you sign it instead,” I said, “that book and that picture go to the lottery office and to Mr. Sundberg. You can explain March of ninety-seven to both of them.”
Noel looked at Dung.
Dung took off his reading glasses. “I heard all of it, Mr. Schaefer.”
Noel took the slip out of his pocket and dropped it on the desk. It didn’t even unfold.
I signed my paper. Frances watched me do it.
“You just gave my present back to me,” she said.
“I did.”
“I’m not done with you, Gabby.” She turned to Dung. “And I want the form for a new power of attorney. Leah’s name goes on it.”
“Grandma…”
“You heard me.”
Noel was gone before Dung found the form.
Frances took her blue ballpoint out of her cardigan, turned the slip over, and signed under the zero.
The third Thursday
Three Thursdays later I dropped the blister packs at the nurses’ station and nobody stopped me.
Jorge had the lighthouse sky done except for one piece near the lamp. He’d been through the box twice and decided it fell out in the van when they moved him.
Leah had taken down the thirty-eight seconds and put up all eleven minutes, from the bingo caller to “keep going, honey.” Fewer people watched that one. The preacher’s wife came back. Two others didn’t, and Tamika keeps their names on a sticky note by the register like she’s waiting on a refill.
Sundberg’s letter came on a Tuesday. Complaint closed. One paragraph.
Frances waved me over from her chair by the fish tank.
“Gabby. Come here.”
She had a new checkbook register open on her knee. The account had her name on it and nobody else’s.
“What do I owe you this week?”
“It’s on the book,” I said.
She clicked her pen and wrote it down.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s been carrying a neighbor on the book for years without saying a word.
Family accusations over money and loyalty surface in a mother’s postcard habit that her children mistook for spending their inheritance and a sister’s fight over a $2.9 million estate. For another painful family confrontation, see the father who told his daughter’s groom she couldn’t bear to watch him die.
