My son and his wife left their six kids with me for one night and never came back, and for nine years I raised them on a state trooper’s word. Then my youngest carried a metal box in from the garage, set it by my coffee and said, “Grandma, sit down. They didn’t die that night.”
It was a Friday in March, a little after eleven, when the knock came.
The trooper had a cough drop in his cheek the whole time he talked. I don’t know why that’s the part that stayed.
“Ma’am, are you Kirk Hickey’s mother?”
I told him I was.
“There was a crash on the interstate. Both of them. I’m sorry.”
After that I only have pieces.
We buried them the next Wednesday. Two closed caskets, side by side, because the funeral director said it was better that way and nobody in that room had the strength to argue with him.
I put both palms flat on the wood anyway.
I kept asking the same thing under my breath until my knees went and my brother Bruce caught me by the elbow.
Why?
There’s no word for what that did to me. I’ve looked.
But you don’t get to fall apart when six children are watching your face to find out if the world is ending. So I quit being the grandma who did Sunday pot roast. I turned into the one who did EVERYTHING.
Seven of us would never fit in my two-bedroom, so we packed up and moved into Kirk’s place outside Altoona.
His kids’ height marks were still penciled on the pantry door. Camille’s reading glasses were still on the windowsill over the sink.
That first year I cried in the shower so nobody would hear me do it.
The little ones woke up screaming most nights.
“I want MOMMY. Where’s Mommy?”
I’d sit on the edge of the mattress in the dark and rub their backs and say nothing, because every answer I had was either a lie or worse.
Days, I worked whatever paid. Overnights stocking shelves at the grocery, and then the cafeteria line at the middle school so I could at least see two of them at lunch.
Nine years went by like that.
The grief never packed up and left. It just pulled out a chair and lived with us.
Those six are my whole life. I don’t say that for pity. Watching them get tall is the best thing that ever happened to me.
But this past winter, something changed in my youngest.
Niamh.
She was five when it happened. Too small to keep any real memory of them. Old enough to feel the hole EVERY single day.
I never lied to that girl. Whenever she asked, I told her what I had, even the ugly parts.
The trouble was, all I ever had was what that trooper said at my door. That was it. That was ALL anybody gave me.
A few months back her questions got strange.
“Did you see them? At the funeral home. Did you actually see them?”
“No, sweetheart. They said it was better not to.”
“Who’s they?”
Then she quit asking anything at all.
She went quiet at dinner. She stopped riding along to her brother Xander’s games. She started spending hours out in the garage, where Kirk and Camille’s things were still stacked in plastic tubs around the old chest freezer that hadn’t run since the year we moved in.
I told myself fourteen-year-olds need a door to close.
I left her alone.
Tuesday morning I was at the stove doing eggs when she came in through the garage door.
She was holding a gray metal lockbox, the fireproof kind, with a little dial on the front. Dust packed into the seams. She set it down next to my coffee mug like it might go off.
“Where’d you find that?”
“Under the basket in the freezer. Taped to the bottom.” Her voice was flat. Careful. “I got the code. It’s their anniversary.”
I turned the burner off.
She looked at me with Kirk’s eyes, that same steady look he used to give me at fourteen when his mind was already made up.
“Grandma, sit down,” she said. “Mom and Dad did NOT die that night. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM.”
She pulled a chair out and kept her hand on my wrist until I was in it.
My fingers were already going.
She slid the box across the table and gave me one nod.
I raised the lid.
Papers. A thick stack, folded in thirds, all in the kind of language you have to read four times before it means anything at all.
I went through them one by one and laid each sheet face down on the table.
They rattled in my hands.
Then I reached the bottom.
The heat went out of my whole body. Something loud and ugly bounced off every wall of that kitchen, and it took me a second to understand the sound was coming out of me.
Because what I was holding took nine years of my life and turned every one of them over.
Every day since that trooper knocked, I’d been living in a LIE.
Allegheny County, March 12
Two death certificates. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the raised seal you can feel with your thumb.
Kirk Quentin Hickey. Place of death, a hospital in Pittsburgh. Date of death, March 12. Time, 4:10 a.m.
Camille Noelle Hickey. Same hospital. March 13. 9:52 p.m.
The trooper knocked on March 10. I know that date the way I know my own birthday. I have bought a cake for it every year, because Niamh asked once if we could, and you don’t tell a six-year-old no about cake.
Kirk lived a day and a half after that knock. Camille lived three.
And I was home. Sitting in this kitchen. Somebody was bringing me casseroles.
Niamh didn’t say anything. She got up and put the eggs in the trash, because they’d gone hard in the pan, and she sat back down.
I turned the certificates face up again and went down every box on the form, because that was the only thing my hands knew how to do.
Cause of death. Words I couldn’t say.
Then a line near the bottom. Informant. The person who gives the hospital the facts.
Bruce W. Niemann. Relationship: uncle.
My maiden name. My brother.
Niamh put her finger on it.
“Grandma, why does Uncle Bruce get to be the one who knew?”
The emergency card
You have to understand who Bruce is to this family, or none of it makes sense.
Our dad died when I was nine and Bruce was twelve, and Bruce quit being a kid that afternoon. He was the one who walked me to school. He was the one who signed my report cards. Forty-one years at the railroad shops in Altoona, never missed a shift, and every person in the family called him when the furnace quit or the car made a noise.
When Kirk’s father walked out on us, Kirk was eleven. Bruce took him fishing every Saturday that summer. Taught him to drive in the lot behind the shops.
The year Kirk turned sixteen, Bruce made him a card for his wallet. I remember him writing it at my table with a carpenter’s pencil. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CALL UNCLE BRUCE, and his number.
“Reba can’t drive the interstate at night,” he said. “You call me.”
He wasn’t wrong. My eyes are bad after dark. Kirk kept that card in his wallet for twenty years. I saw it once when he was paying for pizza, soft as cloth.
Bruce gave the toast at Kirk and Camille’s wedding. June 14, 2003, the fire hall in Duncansville. He said he’d known the day Kirk brought her to Thanksgiving, because Kirk let her have the last roll and Kirk had never given anybody the last of anything.
People cried. I cried.
That Friday night, Bruce was in my driveway before midnight. He took my phone out of my hand. “You don’t have to talk to anybody, Reba. I’ve got it.”
He brought me a little orange bottle from my doctor the next morning. I slept most of that weekend. I’ve always thanked God for that bottle.
He dealt with the funeral home. He dealt with the hospital, he said, the “paperwork end.” The week after the funeral he had me over to his kitchen table and put a form in front of me.
“This keeps the lawyers off you. Sign where the X is.”
I signed where the X was. I’d have signed anything he put there.
When we moved into Kirk’s house, it was Bruce who came out to the garage with me. He opened the chest freezer, made a face and pulled the plug.
“Compressor’s shot. Don’t open it, it’ll stink to high heaven. I’ll haul it off.”
He taped a piece of cardboard to the lid. DEAD. DON’T OPEN. Black marker, his capital letters.
Nine years. He never hauled it off.
Every Christmas since, a card from Bruce and his wife Tamar with three hundred dollars inside. “For the kids.” I cashed every one of them and called to say thank you.
And every Fourth of July, the kids spent the week at Bruce and Tamar’s place on Raystown Lake. A cabin with a dock and a pontoon. Bruce let Xander drive it the summer he turned twelve.
He bought that cabin the summer after the funeral. He told me he’d been saving forty years for it.
I sat at my kitchen table with his name under my finger and picked up the phone.
I didn’t call him.
Stokes Funeral Home
I called the funeral home instead.
Old Mr. Stokes died a few years back. His son Joseph runs it now, same building on the corner, same green awning. Joseph was a kid with a clipboard the day we buried them.
I gave him the names and the year. He was quiet a long time. I could hear him typing with two fingers.
“Mrs. Hickey, I’ve got the file right here.”
“Where did they come from? My son and his wife. Where did you pick them up?”
“From the hospital in Pittsburgh. Tuesday, March 14. Our van brought them back that afternoon.”
The day before the funeral.
“And who said closed? Who said it was better not to see them?”
More typing. Niamh was standing at the counter with her arms crossed so tight she was holding her own elbows.
“It’s in my dad’s notes,” Joseph said. “Closed caskets, family’s request. Both services paid in full. Bruce Niemann.”
“Your dad told me it was better that way. I remember him saying it.”
“Ma’am, I don’t doubt you remember that. But my dad wrote down everything, and what he wrote is your brother asked for it.”
I said thank you. I don’t know why I said thank you.
I hung up and Niamh said it before I could.
“So ‘they’ is him.”
“He paid for the funerals,” I said. “That’s all that is.”
She went to the box and took out the next sheet. Unfolded it. Laid it in front of me face up.
“Then read this one, Grandma.”
My own signature
Niamh had already been through every page. She’d had weeks out there with that box and her phone, looking up words. She sat next to me and went through it slow, like I was the one who was fourteen.
The first paper was from a lawyer in Pittsburgh. A settlement. A trucking company and its insurance, the truck that crossed the median that night. It had a number on it I had to count the zeros on twice.
One million, three hundred fifty thousand dollars.
To the estates of Kirk Hickey and Camille Hickey. Signed for the estates by the administrator. Bruce W. Niemann.
The second paper set up a trust for six minor children. My grandchildren, all six names, birthdays and all. The trustee was Bruce W. Niemann.
The third paper was the one I’d signed at his kitchen table.
Renunciation. I renounce my right to letters of administration in favor of my brother. My name at the bottom, in my handwriting, shaky. The X was still there in pencil next to it.
Niamh put her hand flat on it.
“The website says the person who’s in charge of the estate decides the settlement,” she said. “And the one who’s in charge of the trust decides the money. He’s both. You gave him both.”
That was when Xander came down. Sixteen and six foot one, hair wet from the shower, looking for the eggs.
He saw the box. He saw his sister’s face.
“What’s going on?”
Niamh told him. All of it, fast, the dates and the hospital and the number with the zeros.
Xander laughed once, the way you laugh when somebody says something crazy at school.
“Okay, but that’s not, like, stealing. Uncle Bruce paid for my cleats. He paid for my travel team. He’s the one who came when the furnace went.” He looked at me. “Grandma. It’s Uncle Bruce.”
“Then where’s the money, Xander?” Niamh said. “Where is it?”
He didn’t have an answer. Neither did I.
Niamh reached into the box one more time, under where the certificates had been, and took out the thing she’d saved.
A closing statement from a title company. The kind you get when you buy a house.
The address was on Raystown Lake.
The pontoon
I’ve bought exactly one house in my life, and I know what a closing statement looks like. The buyers’ names go at the top.
Bruce W. Niemann and Tamar R. Niemann.
July 2017. Four months after the funeral. Purchase price, two hundred eighty-nine thousand.
And on the second page, where it shows where the money came from, there was one line. A wire transfer. And the account it came from was named, plain as anything, in the little box.
Hickey Minor Children’s Trust.
Xander picked it up off the table. He read it standing up. Then he sat down in his mother’s chair at the end, which nobody sits in, and he read it again.
“That’s the lake house,” he said.
Nobody answered him.
“I learned to drive the boat there.” He put the paper down very carefully, square with the edge of the table. “He used to say, ‘Don’t scratch my boat.’ My boat.”
Niamh took my hand and pulled me up, and the three of us went out through the garage door.
The freezer was where it’s always been, white and yellowed, the tubs stacked around it. The cardboard was still taped to the lid. DEAD. DON’T OPEN.
Niamh lifted the lid. No smell. There never had been any smell. It was clean in there, like somebody wiped it out before they shut it.
She lifted the wire basket out and turned it over to show me.
Strips of silver duct tape on the bottom, crisscrossed where the box had been held. And on one strip, in black marker, half rubbed off, a set of numbers.
0-6-1-4-0-3.
Capital-letter handwriting. The same marker as the sign on the lid.
“He wrote the code down so he wouldn’t forget it,” Niamh said. “I didn’t need it. I knew their anniversary. I’ve read their wedding card a hundred times.”
He’d known it too. He gave the toast.
I stood there holding the basket. My son’s freezer. My son’s garage. My brother’s tape.
Xander had his phone out. He wasn’t calling anybody. He was looking at a picture from last Fourth of July, the six of them on the pontoon, Bruce at the wheel in his Pirates cap, everybody squinting.
I went inside and picked up the phone and called my brother.
“Come to the house. Bring Tamar.”
Bruce at the table
They came at seven. I had the box on the table, closed, and every paper face down beside it in a row, the way I’d laid them out that morning.
Tamar sat down. Bruce didn’t. He looked at the box and then at me and he put his car keys on the counter, which is what he does when he’s staying.
“Where’d you get that, Reba?”
I didn’t say anything. I turned the first sheet over. The certificate. March 12.
He looked at it a long time.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You want to do this. Let’s do this.”
He pulled out a chair and sat.
“They were never coming back. You hear me? Never. They had Kirk on a machine breathing for him. They had Camille on two. The doctor said it to me in the hallway, said there was nothing. Nothing. The hospital called me because I’m who Kirk had on that card. You remember that card.”
I turned the second sheet over.
“You were on the floor, Reba. I came in that door and you were on the floor of your own kitchen. You couldn’t drive to Pittsburgh. You’d have sat in that hallway for three days and watched them pull the tubes and you would have never gotten up again. Never. And then who’s got six kids? Who’s got them? Me?”
Tamar was looking at the paper. She had her reading glasses on her head and she pulled them down.
I turned over the settlement.
“That’s money from a trucking company. That’s lawyers. You can’t do lawyers. You couldn’t do the funeral home, you couldn’t pick out the caskets, I picked out the caskets. Somebody had to sign. I signed.”
I turned over the trust. Then the paper with my name on it.
“You signed that because I told you to and you were right to. Somebody had to handle it.”
I turned over the last one. The closing statement. I slid it across to him, the way Niamh had slid the box to me.
Tamar picked it up before he could. She read the second page. I saw her get to the line.
“Bruce,” she said. “You told me that was your pension buyout.”
“Tamar, stay out of this.”
“You told me it was the railroad.”
“The kids use that place every summer.” He was talking to me now, louder. “Every summer. They have the best week of their year at that lake. That’s theirs. That’s their mother and father’s money and it’s a place for them. What would they have done with a pile in a bank? Six kids?”
Xander was in the doorway. Niamh was behind him on the stairs. I hadn’t told them to stay up there and they hadn’t.
“What’s left in the trust, Bruce?” I said.
He looked at the papers. He looked at Tamar.
“There were expenses.”
“What’s left?”
“I gave you three hundred dollars every Christmas,” he said. “Every single Christmas. Nine years. I paid for that boy’s cleats. I put a furnace in this house. You think that came out of the air?”
“How much is left?”
He picked up his keys off the counter and held them.
“There’s about eleven thousand dollars, Reba.”
Out of one million three hundred fifty.
Tamar stood up. She put the closing statement down on the table, face down, and she walked out the front door and sat in their truck, in the passenger seat, in the dark.
Bruce didn’t go after her. He stood there and looked at me like I was nine and had spilled something.
“You do anything with that box,” he said, “you’re putting your brother in jail at seventy years old. For a lake house your own grandkids swim at. And it’s your name on that paper too. You signed it. You remember that.”
I gathered the sheets up, one by one, and put them back in the box and closed the lid and spun the dial.
“Friday morning I’m taking this to the courthouse in Hollidaysburg,” I said. “With Niamh.”
Bruce opened his mouth and nothing came out.
Then Xander stepped out of the doorway and held the front door open for him.
“Uncle Bruce,” he said. “Your keys are in your hand.”
June 14
The judge in orphans’ court took Bruce off as trustee in May. The lake place is frozen now, with a lawyer’s name on it that isn’t his. It will go to the six of them. It’s worth more than he paid, which is the only thing about it I’ll say for him.
Bruce hasn’t called. Tamar sends a text sometimes, just “thinking of you all.” I answer her.
He was the one who caught me by the elbow. Nobody catches me now. I’ve had to learn to stay up on my own.
On their anniversary, the kids carried the chest freezer out to the curb. Xander on one end, Niamh on the other, the two oldest on the corners. The township truck takes appliances on Thursdays.
Before they set it down, I put both palms flat on the lid.
Then I peeled the cardboard sign off and folded it in thirds and put it in my apron pocket.
Tuesday morning I came down and Niamh was already at the stove doing eggs.
She slid a plate next to my coffee mug.
“Grandma, sit down,” she said. “They’re not burnt this time.”
If somebody in your family once “handled everything” so you wouldn’t have to, it’s not an insult to ask to see the papers. Ask kindly, and ask soon.
For more family secrets that surface when everything seems settled, read the $9,800 that brought Dad to the door and the loan someone notarized against a family home. And for another story of a grandmother showing up when a child needs her, there’s the broth brought to Nevaeh’s hospital floor.
