I drove four hours down for my mother’s 81st birthday without telling her, and my brother’s wife blocked the screen and said, “She doesn’t do company anymore, she gets mixed up.” I found Mom alone in her bedroom, closed up to the chin in my dead father’s hunting jacket, and when I touched the top button, she caught my wrist.
I’d left Youngstown before seven with a coconut cake riding in the passenger seat and a pair of sheepskin slippers in a gift bag on the floor mat.
The whole way down I kept picturing how she’d look.
That squeal she does.
Coffee at the kitchen table.
The ice storm story, the one about Dad and the chainsaw, for the hundredth time.
Probably a dig about how my last visit was Easter.
Stacie answered the door instead.
My brother’s wife looked at me through the screen like I’d shown up to read the gas meter.
“Janelle. You didn’t call.”
“It’s her eighty-first. That’s the point of not calling.”
Her hand stayed on the latch.
“Drop-ins really upset her now.”
I didn’t like the way she said it.
“Upset her how?”
“She loses track of things. She NEEDS her schedule.”
Since spring, every call I made to Mom got picked up by Stacie or Darius first.
She’s napping.
She’s having a bad day.
She keeps forgetting stuff.
She doesn’t feel like talking.
Twice I’d heard Mom saying something behind them right before the line went dead.
I let it go because I work six days a week at the distribution center and Darius lives eleven minutes from her, and I told myself my little brother down the road beat a daughter four hours north.
Out on that front step, it hit me that I hadn’t checked one thing they’d told me since March.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said. “Where is she?”
Stacie’s mouth went flat.
Then she unhooked the latch.
Something was off before I got past the hall closet.
Every blind in the house was shut on a bright Sunday morning.
The church pictures were gone off the stairway wall.
So were Mom’s African violets, all fourteen pots, and the bowling trophies Dad won in 1988 that she dusted every Saturday of her life.
In their place were beige throw pillows and a framed print of a sailboat nobody in our family has ever set foot on.
It looked like a model home.
Like a rental.
“What happened to her violets?”
Stacie followed two steps back.
“She can’t keep up with all that junk.”
I turned around.
“That junk was HER WHOLE LIFE, Stacie.”
She pressed her lips into a little grin.
“Things change, Janelle.”
The bedroom door at the end was half open.
Mom was standing by the bed with the blinds pulled behind her.
I almost didn’t know her.
She’d gotten so small. Both cheeks had caved in, her gray hair was flat and uncombed, and her eyes had a worn-down look nobody had mentioned once on the phone.
But it was the jacket I couldn’t stop staring at.
Dad’s red wool hunting jacket.
The one she hadn’t let anybody touch in six years.
Closed all the way to her chin.
The thermostat in the hall said 74.
I set the cake carrier on her dresser and crouched down next to her.
“Happy eighty-first, Mama.”
She turned her head slowly.
Then she knew me.
“Nellie?”
Nobody else alive calls me that.
“Yeah. It’s me, Mama.”
For half a second her whole face came back.
I went to put my arms around her.
She flinched so hard I stopped with my hands in the air.
“Mama?”
Her eyes went past me to the door.
Stacie’s footsteps had quit somewhere in the hall.
“What is it?”
I reached up, slow, for that top button.
Her hand clamped onto my wrist.
There was nothing in her grip. No strength at all.
Her stare was another thing.
“Please, Nellie,” she said.
She looked at the door one more time.
“DON’T TAKE DAD’S JACKET OFF ME.”
The top button
I let go of the button.
“Okay, Mama. It stays on. I won’t touch it.”
She watched the door another second.
Then she pulled my hand around behind her, slow, and pressed it flat against the middle of her back.
Under the wool, something crackled.
Paper. Folded thick, a whole stack of it, riding in the game pocket Dad used to fill with shotgun shells and peppermints.
“They can’t get into it while I’ve got it on,” she said. “That’s why.”
“Who can’t?”
“You sleep in this?”
“Since June.”
The floor in the hall creaked.
Stacie came in with a glass of water and a little white paper cup with two pills in it.
“Marian, honey, you’re sweating through that thing. Let’s get it off you before you overheat.”
Mom didn’t move.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“She’s not fine, Janelle. It’s seventy-four degrees in here. She thinks it’s January.” Stacie set the water on the dresser next to my cake carrier. “This is what I’m talking about. She gets an idea in her head.”
Mom was looking at the pill cup.
Stacie held it out to her. Mom took the pills and put them in her mouth and drank the water, every bit, and handed the glass back.
“Good girl,” Stacie said, and took the glass back to the kitchen.
Mom taught third grade at Harmar Elementary for thirty-one years.
Mom waited until the footsteps reached the kitchen.
Then she leaned close, and her breath smelled like the peppermints, and she spit two white pills into her palm and pushed them down into the pocket of her slacks.
“Mama.”
“They make me sleep,” she said. “I don’t want to sleep anymore.”
She put her cold hand on my cheek.
“Did you get my letters, Nellie?”
“What letters?”
Her face did something I didn’t like.
“I wrote you three. Stacie walked them out to the box herself.”
The ice storm
You have to understand about the jacket.
In February of 1994 an ice storm came up the Ohio River and took out every power line in Washington County. I was fourteen. Darius was seven. The maple in the front yard split down the middle and laid half of itself across the porch roof, and the power stayed off for nine days.
The part she tells less is what he did the first night.
He got the red hunting jacket down from the cedar closet and emptied the shotgun shells out of its game pocket. Then he went to the strongbox under their bed and took out the deed to the house, our birth certificates, his and Mom’s marriage license and the savings passbook from the credit union.
He put every one of them in a bread bag, rolled it, and zipped it into that pocket across his back.
Mom said, “Al, what on earth.”
He said, “If the house goes, the house goes. This doesn’t come off me.”
He wore it nine days straight. Slept in it by the kerosene heater.
I thought it was the safest I had ever felt.
When they paid the house off in 2003, Mom framed the bank’s letter and Dad put the original deed back in the strongbox and said, “Well, that’s the last time that pocket has to work.”
The pocket zips from inside the lining.
You can’t get into it unless the jacket is open.
That’s the first thing.
The second thing is the calendar.
Mom kept a wall calendar by the kitchen phone my entire life. Every one of them came free from the hardware store on Front Street, and every one of them was filled in with Dad’s flat carpenter pencil, the kind you sharpen with a pocketknife. When people say my mother needs her schedule, they’re right. She’s needed it since 1971.
She just always used to write it herself.
Dad died six years ago this past August, in his recliner with the Reds game on. Darius got there first. I was four hours away.
At the cemetery Mom held onto Stacie’s arm, not mine.
Afterward Mom put Darius on her checking account. “So somebody close can get to it if I fall,” she said. I was the one who drove her to the credit union to sign the card. I thought it was smart.
That Christmas Mom called Stacie “my daughter who stayed.” She meant it as a compliment to Stacie. She didn’t hear what it did to me, and I didn’t tell her.
I stood up off that carpet with my knees popping.
“I’m going to get that coffee,” I said.
Mom grabbed the hem of my sweater.
“Don’t ask her about the letters, Nellie. Not yet.”
So I didn’t.
I went to the kitchen and opened the drawer by the stove to find a knife for the cake.
The junk drawer
Every kitchen in Ohio has the drawer.
There was also a cake knife, the long one with the yellowed handle.
There they were underneath it, rubber-banded together.
Three envelopes.
My name and my address in Youngstown in Mom’s handwriting. Round, slanted a little to the right, every letter closed up the way a third-grade teacher closes them. A Forever stamp on each one, put on straight.
No postmark on any of them.
The top one had March written small in the corner, in pencil. Then May. Then August.
Behind me the coffee maker was gurgling.
Stacie was at the counter with her back to me, pouring creamer into a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GRANDMA.
I put the envelopes in the back pocket of my jeans and pulled my sweater down over them, and I shut the drawer with my hip, and I stood there holding the cake knife like I’d come for that.
“She takes it with just a little cream now,” Stacie said. “Her stomach.”
“Okay.”
“I know how this looks to you.” She turned around with the mug. “You walk in, the place looks different, she’s not herself. You think I’m some kind of monster.”
“I’m over here every single day. Do you know she left the stove on in April? The front burner.”
“Was it lit?”
“What?”
“The burner. Was it lit, or just on?”
She looked at me like that was the stupidest question a person ever asked.
“Where are her violets?”
“Oh my God. With the violets.”
“Where are they, Stacie?”
“They were drawing bugs. Those little gnats. I put them out.” “And the trophies were a fall risk. She’d get up on the step stool to dust them. At eighty.”
Stacie picked her phone up off the counter and looked at it, and she typed something with her thumb, quick.
“Darius is coming over,” she said. “So we can all talk.”
“About what?”
“About you being here.”
Mom’s red flip phone was by the toaster, plugged into the wall, with a sticky note on it in handwriting that was not Mom’s.
Do not give to M after 6 pm.
The garage
I told Stacie I was getting the gift bag out of the car.
Then I went around the side of the house instead of back in the front, because the side door to the garage has never once been locked in my lifetime. Dad used to say if anybody wanted his lawnmower that bad they could have it.
It was locked.
There was a new deadbolt on it. Bright brass. The screws still had the shine on them.
I went around back.
On the kitchen door, the one that opens onto the patio, somebody had hung a gray box over the knob. A combination box, the kind with four little wheels on the front. I stood there in the yard with a gift bag of slippers and looked at it for a long time.
The garage has a window on the far side, down by Dad’s workbench. I wiped the glass with my sleeve and cupped my hands and looked in.
The violets were in there.
All fourteen pots, lined up on the concrete under the workbench, out of the light. Most of them had gone yellow and soft. Two of them had dropped flat over the rim. One in the back still had a purple bloom on it.
Next to them were three cardboard boxes from the liquor store on Pike Street. One said GOODWILL in black marker. The top of a bowling trophy was sticking out of it, the little gold man with his arm back.
And leaning against Dad’s workbench, face out, still in its plastic sleeve, was a sign.
COMING SOON.
Under that, a woman’s face, a phone number and a name.
CIARA LEONE · LEONE & PRINS REALTY · MARIETTA’S HOMETOWN TEAM.
I took out my phone and took a picture through the glass. I called it right there in the yard.
It rang four times and went to voicemail. A bright voice. “You’ve reached Ciara Leone. I’m probably out showing your dream home right now.”
I hung up without saying anything.
The back door opened.
It was Darius.
My little brother is thirty-nine and six-foot-two, and he still stands like he did at seven when he’d broken something. He had on his church slacks and a Bengals windbreaker.
“Stace said you just showed up.”
“It’s Mom’s birthday.”
“I know it’s Mom’s birthday. We were going to do something tonight.”
I held my phone up so he could see the picture.
He didn’t come closer to look. He didn’t need to.
“You’re selling her house,” I said.
“Don’t do this out here, Nell. The neighbors are right there.”
“Are you selling Mom’s house, Darius?”
He took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed his face with both of them.
“She signed it,” he said. “Okay? She signed the paper. Stace has power of attorney since June. It’s legal. It’s all legal. Her doctor says she’s declining, Nell. You don’t see it because you’re not here.”
“Does she know?”
He didn’t answer that.
From inside, I heard Stacie’s voice, high and sweet, saying Marian, honey, come out and see who’s here.
Darius stepped back to hold the door for me.
“There’s a place in Belpre,” he said. “Riverview. It’s nice. It’s real nice. They have a bed for her November first.”
Riverview
Mom sat at the table when I came back, in the jacket, with her hands folded on the placemat.
“Look who came,” Stacie said. “Isn’t this a surprise.”
Mom looked at me.
I could see her checking my face to see what I’d found.
I sat down across from her. Darius stayed on his feet by the refrigerator. Stacie stood behind Mom’s chair with both hands resting on the back of it.
She had a folder. Blue, with a pocket on each side. She’d had it by the bread box the whole time, and she set it on the table and opened it and turned it around so it faced me.
On top was a durable power of attorney. Ohio form. Mom’s name typed in. Stacie’s name typed in as the agent. A notary’s stamp in the corner, from a notary in Parkersburg.
Mom’s signature at the bottom, round, slanted a little to the right.
Dated June 12.
“I never asked to be the one,” Stacie said. “Darius couldn’t do it. So I’ll be the bad guy. Somebody has to.”
Under that was a letter on a doctor’s letterhead. A family practice in Parkersburg, not Mom’s doctor, who has been Dr. Ibrahim on Greene Street for twenty-two years.
I read it. Two paragraphs. Mild cognitive impairment consistent with age. Patient would benefit from supervision of financial affairs.
“Who’s Dr. Rivers?” I said.
“He’s who we see now.”
I looked at Mom. Mom was looking at the folder, and her mouth was shut in a line.
“Mama, did you sign this?”
“She signed it,” Stacie said.
“I’m asking her.”
“And I’m telling you, she doesn’t remember half of what she signs. That’s why there’s a paper.”
I tried something then, and I want to be honest that it was the wrong thing.
“Okay,” I said. “Then I’ll take her up to Youngstown for a week. Today. She can stay with me. I’ll take the time off. We’ll get a second opinion up there.”
I stood up.
“Mama, you want to come stay with me a while?”
Mom started to push herself up out of the chair.
Stacie put one hand on her shoulder. She didn’t push. She just left it there.
“Sit down, Marian.”
Mom sat down.
“She’s not going anywhere,” Stacie said to me. “You can’t just take her. You don’t get to do that. I have the paper. If you put her in that car, I’ll call the sheriff and tell them you removed a vulnerable adult, and they’ll come get her, and they’ll put it in a report, and then you can explain to them why a woman who works six days a week thinks she’s the better choice.”
“She’s my mother.”
“She’s my responsibility. Legally.” Stacie looked at Darius. “Tell her.”
Darius was studying the floor tile.
“It’s better, Nell,” he said. “Riverview’s better. She can’t be in this house alone. Stace is wore out.”
“Who’s paying for Riverview?”
“The house,” Stacie said. “That’s what houses are for.”
Mom put her hands flat on the table.
“I’m not deaf,” she said. “I’m sitting right here.”
“I know you are, honey.”
“This is my house.”
“I know it is.”
“Albert paid for this house.”
“Marian,” Stacie said, and she bent down by her ear, and she said it very gently, “Albert’s gone, sweetheart. Remember? We talked about it.”
Mom closed her eyes.
Her hands on the table started to shake. Not a lot. Just the fingers.
And then she said nothing at all, and that was worse.
Stacie looked at me over the top of Mom’s head.
“See?” she said. “This is what drop-ins do.”
I sat back down. I didn’t know what else to do with my body.
The gray lockbox swung on the knob and knocked against the door, twice.
The game pocket
I told them I’d help Mom change for the birthday, so she’d feel nice, and Stacie said that would be good, put her in the blue blouse, it’s on the chair.
Mom held my arm the whole way to her room. In the bedroom she shut the door herself and pushed the button lock.
Then she put her back against it.
“How long do we have?” I said.
“She does the dishwasher at noon,” Mom said. “She won’t let anybody else load it.”
It was eleven forty.
Mom reached up with her own hands and undid the top button of Dad’s jacket.
Then the next one. Then the rest of them, all the way down, and she opened the front of it, and the smell of cedar came out. She held the left side of the jacket open and found the zipper in the lining by feel, and pulled it across.
She reached into the game pocket, all the way back, and brought out a bread bag. Roman Meal. Rolled up tight and folded over twice, the way Dad did it in 1994.
She handed it to me.
“Your father’s idea,” she said.
I sat on the bed and unrolled it.
On top was a calendar. Not the whole thing. The pages, torn off the wire, March through October. The hardware store’s name across the top of each one. Every square filled in, in flat carpenter pencil.
Mar 3. Phone in S’s purse. Asked for it. “Charging.”
Mar 19. Nellie called. S said asleep. I was not asleep.
Apr 8. Front burner. S left it on. Underlined.
Apr 22. Violets moved to garage. Said gnats. No gnats.
May 30. Letter #2 to Nellie. S walked it to the box. S said mailed.
June 12. Drove to Parkersburg. Paper for “the furnace warranty.” Man with a stamp. S held my glasses.
June 13. Not the furnace.
June 14. Slept in Al’s coat.
I read June 13 again.
“You knew,” I said.
“I knew the next day. I got up at four in the morning and went through her folder while she slept on the couch. She’d hid my glasses. But I could read attorney.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“With what phone?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
Under the calendar pages were the papers. A yellow carbon copy of the power of attorney, the customer copy, with FURNACE? written across the top in pencil.
And under that, folded in three, a letter from the credit union.
Mom’s credit union. The one I drove her to after the funeral.
Dear Marian Sanders. Thank you for choosing us for your Home Equity Line of Credit. Your first statement is enclosed.
There was a number.
Credit limit, $60,000. Balance, $38,500.
Drawn in two pieces. July 9 and August 21.
“I got the mail before she did one time,” Mom said. “Just one time. September. She had a dentist appointment. I went out in my robe.”
“Mama. Who took this out?”
“I never borrowed a dime on this house,” she said. “Your father paid it off in 2003. I framed the letter. She took it down with my church pictures.”
Mom looked at me a long time.
Then she reached back into the pocket of the jacket and took out one more thing, which she’d kept separate, in a sandwich bag of its own.
A credit union withdrawal slip. Pink. Carbon. The kind with a copy for the customer.
July 9. $20,000.
Signed on the line in big, sloppy capitals, the way my brother has signed things since he was seven years old.
DARIUS SANDERS.
Outside in the hall, the dishwasher door dropped open with a clunk.
“She doesn’t know I’ve got that,” Mom said. “I took it out of his truck.”
The kitchen table
I put the bread bag on the kitchen table next to my coconut cake.
Mom came in behind me in Dad’s jacket, buttoned back up to the chin, and she sat down in her own chair at the head of the table, where Dad used to sit.
Stacie was rinsing a plate at the sink. She turned off the water.
“What’s that?”
I took out the credit union letter and unfolded it and laid it flat.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.
Stacie read it standing up, twice, with the dishtowel still in her hands.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s addressed to Mom,” I said.
“That is private financial information, Janelle. I have the power of attorney. That’s mine to handle.” She pointed at the bag. “What else did you take out of her room?”
“It’s hers,” Mom said.
“Marian, honey, you don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a Home Equity Line of Credit,” Mom said. “Thirty-eight thousand five hundred dollars.”
Stacie opened her mouth and closed it.
Darius came in from the front room. He saw the letter on the table and he stopped in the doorway.
Stacie turned around on him.
“I told you. I told you to get the mail. Every day, I said, you get the mail on the way home, it’s eleven minutes, and you said fine, fine, and now look.” She threw her hand out at the table. “Now look at this. Now she thinks I did this.”
“Stace.”
“No. No. I’m not doing this, Darius. I am not going to stand here in this kitchen and be the one.” She turned back to me, and her face was red all the way up into her hairline. “You want to know? You want to know where that money went? Ask your brother about his truck. Ask him about Mountaineer. Ask him how many Friday nights he’s driven to Mountaineer since the plant cut his overtime. Ask him who called me crying in July because they were going to take our house. Our house, Janelle. With my kids in it.”
Darius said, “Stacie, shut up.”
“I will not shut up. I have been carrying this for four months. I am the one who drove her to Parkersburg. I am the one who sat in that office and held her glasses. Me. Because he couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t even be in the car.” She was crying now, mad, the kind with no sound in it. “He said it was a loan. He said the house sells, we pay it off out of the sale, she goes to Riverview, nobody ever has to know, it all comes out even. That’s what you said, Darius. It all comes out even.”
“I was going to pay it back.”
“With what?”
Darius didn’t have anything for that.
Stacie wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
“I did her pills every day for six years,” she said. “And I’m the monster.”
Mom spoke from the head of the table.
“You hid my glasses, Stacie.”
Nobody said anything.
I took my phone out and found the picture of the sign through the garage window, and I called the number.
It rang twice this time.
“This is Ciara!”
“Ms. Leone, my name is Janelle Sanders. You’ve got a listing coming up on my mother’s house on Fourth Street. Marian Sanders.”
“Oh, sure. Yes. The Sanders property. Beautiful bones on that one. We’re live on the fifteenth, we’ve got photos done, it’s all staged. Are you with the family?”
“I’m her daughter. Who did you list it with?”
“With the power of attorney. Mrs. Stacie Sanders. She told me Mrs. Sanders wasn’t able to come to the phone.” A pause. “Is something wrong?”
I put the phone on speaker and set it on the table in front of Mom.
Mom leaned over it with both hands flat on the placemat.
“This is Marian Sanders,” she said. “I’m eighty-one years old today. I taught Harmar Elementary third grade for thirty-one years. You probably had my granddaughter. That’s my house you’ve got pictures of, and it isn’t for sale.”
There was a long quiet on the line.
“Mrs. Sanders,” Ciara Leone said, carefully. “I’m going to need that in writing.”
“She’ll have it in writing,” I said.
“Then I’m pulling it today. Pending. I’m sorry. I’ll call the office.”
She hung up.
Stacie had her arms folded tight. “That’s not how it works. I have the paper. That paper is legal. She can’t just get on the phone and cancel me.”
I took the birthday card out of the gift bag.
I’d bought it at a Kroger in Findlay at six thirty that morning. A cardinal on a snowy branch.
I turned it over to the back, which was blank, and I wrote on it with the carpenter pencil from the calendar pages.
I, Marian Sanders, revoke the power of attorney I signed on June 12 naming Stacie Sanders. Effective today.
I put the date.
I slid it across to Mom with the pencil.
Mom found her glasses in the front pocket of the jacket, where she’d put them back the second she found them in Stacie’s purse in September, and she put them on, and she read it. Then she signed it, round, slanted a little to the right.
“You need a notary,” Stacie said. “That’s not even, you need a notary for that.”
“Then we’ll get one Monday,” I said. “And then we’ll go to the credit union. And then we’ll call Dr. Ibrahim.”
Darius was still in the doorway. He hadn’t moved.
“Nell,” he said. “If she takes this to the credit union, they’ll call the police on me.”
I looked at him.
“Then you’d better have a plan to pay it back on Monday,” I said. “Because I’m driving her.”
“You’re going to do that to me? Your own brother? Today?”
Mom took her glasses off and folded them.
“Darius,” she said. “Go home.”
He went. Stacie went after him, and the back door banged against the gray lockbox on its way shut.
I called my supervisor at the distribution center from the patio and told him I wouldn’t be in for my shift on Monday or Tuesday or probably the rest of the week, and he said, “Janelle, you know where you’re at on points,” and I said I knew.
Then I went back in and cut the cake.
Mom ate two pieces.
The passenger seat
Three Saturdays later I drove down again.
I left Youngstown before seven with fourteen new pots of violets riding in a flat box in the passenger seat, belted in, because the clerk at the garden center told me they’d tip.
Eleven of the old ones lived. I’d cut the soft parts off on her kitchen counter with Dad’s pocketknife and repotted them that first week, the week I didn’t go to work, and they were sitting in the front window when I pulled up.
The blinds were open.
The deadbolt was off the garage door. I’d taken it off myself with Dad’s drill.
The notary at the credit union had been a woman named Brigid with reading glasses on a beaded chain. The credit union froze the line that afternoon.
Darius signed a repayment agreement on the Wednesday. Four hundred and twelve dollars a month for eight years. He signed it in big, sloppy capitals and didn’t look at either one of us.
He hasn’t called since.
I lost the job. They let me go the second week of November for attendance. Monday I start second shift at a warehouse out on Route 795, for a dollar forty less an hour.
I don’t think about the dollar forty much.
Mom met me at the screen door before I could knock.
She had on her blue blouse and her cardigan and Dad’s red jacket over the top of it all, buttoned up to her chin.
“It’s sixty-one in here,” she said. “I turned the heat down. I’m cold.”
“You want me to turn it up?”
“No,” she said. “I’m wearing your father.”
She carried the cake carrier in herself and set it on the kitchen table. Then she took the new wall calendar down off the nail by the phone, a free one from the hardware store, and wrote my name in the third Saturday of November with the flat carpenter pencil.
She stood there a second with her back to me.
Then she undid the top button of the jacket, and the next one, and all the rest, and took it off and hung it on the hook by the back door.
“Now,” she said. “Tell me about this new job.”
If this one stayed with you, call the person in your family who always picks up the phone first, and ask for your mother by name.
For more complicated family reckonings, read about a mother who sent her son’s pralines back to the truck and the forged deed that outlasted its owner. There’s also the family dispute over Grandma’s canceled nurse – and who had keys.
