My two brothers split Mom’s $212,000 across the folding table of her laundromat four days after the funeral, and Jamie laughed that the sister who quit her job to bathe her could keep “the building with the dead boiler.” Neither of them had ever looked inside her change machine. I had.
They did it on a Thursday, with the dryers still ticking as they cooled.
Mom had been in the ground since Sunday.
For three years I’d lived in the apartment over the shop in Altoona, lifting her out of the tub, cutting her toast into fingers, learning which pill made her throw the remote at the TV.
Jamie and Drew came for the service and stayed for the money.
Neither of them had been up those back stairs since the Christmas she called Drew by our dead uncle’s name.
Stefanie, Jamie’s wife, laid the bank statements out on the folding table in two neat rows, like she was dealing solitaire.
“Two hundred twelve,” she said. “Straight down the middle, that’s a hundred and six each.”
“Each of who?” I said.
Jamie didn’t look up from his phone. “Each of us, Lana. You’ve got the building.”
Drew snorted. He’d found a lint roller by the register and was running it down the leg of his funeral slacks, over and over.
“The building,” he said. “With the boiler that quit in February and the roof that rains straight into number nine.”
“Mom always said this place takes care of whoever stays,” Jamie said. “So. You stayed.”
They both laughed.
I didn’t.
I was leaning against the change machine with my hands in my cardigan pockets.
It was the old steel kind, bolted to the wall by the door, older than Drew. Mom fed it twenties every morning at six and talked to it when it jammed.
The lost-and-found basket under it still held the same green mitten it had held since the winter before she got sick.
Across the street, the crane over the hospital’s new parking garage swung past the front window, the way it had every morning for two years.
Nobody at the table looked at it.
“There’s one more thing,” Stefanie said.
She took a sheet out of her purse and slid it across the table, between the two rows.
A quitclaim deed. My name typed under an empty line.
“My cousin’s husband flips houses,” she said. “He’ll take the building as-is. Ninety-five thousand, cash, no inspection.”
“It’s in my name,” I said.
“That’s why you sign it,” Jamie said. “Then we split the ninety-five three ways and you’re out from under that roof. Honestly, Lana, you should be THANKING us.”
“Where would I live?”
Drew shrugged. “You’re forty-nine. Get an apartment like a normal person.”
“It’s a LAUNDROMAT,” Jamie said. “It’s quarters. Nobody WANTS this corner but you.”
Stefanie clicked a pen and set it across the deed.
Here’s what none of them knew.
Three weeks before Mom died, she had one good morning.
She sent me downstairs to fold a customer’s comforters, and Alan Richter came up the back stairs with his briefcase and stayed an hour.
When he left, she called me up.
“Get the Phillips,” she said. “And the packing tape.”
I walked her down to the change machine one step at a time, her walker banging every stair.
I took the back panel off. She taped a long white envelope flat to the inside of it and smoothed the tape with her thumb TWICE.
“Read it one time,” she said. “So you know I’m not senile. Then put the screws back.”
I read it.
I put the screws back.
Now I took my hands out of my pockets.
“Is the screwdriver still in the drawer?” I said.
Jamie finally looked up. “For what?”
“Mom’s machine is jammed.”
“Lana. Sign the paper.”
I got the screwdriver myself.
Four screws. They dropped into my palm one at a time, and the room got quiet enough that I heard the last dryer settle.
Drew stopped rolling.
The panel came away heavier than I remembered. The envelope was still there, the tape gone yellow at the corners, Mom’s square capitals across the front.
I peeled it loose and laid it on the folding table, right on top of their hundred and six each.
Stefanie opened it, because Stefanie opens everything.
She read the first page and her lips went thin.
“What is it?” Jamie said.
She didn’t answer. She flipped to the last page, where the signatures were.
“It’s from the hospital,” she said. “A purchase agreement. For the lot.”
“How much?” Drew said.
Stefanie looked at me and not at him.
“Three million, one hundred and forty thousand dollars.”
Nobody laughed.
Jamie took it out of her hand and held it close to his face, the way he used to hold my report cards up to the kitchen light to check if I’d changed a grade.
“Mom signed this,” he said.
“She did.”
He turned it toward Drew and put his finger under the date.
Drew read it and went white around the mouth.
“March third,” he said. “THAT’S THE SAME MORNING SHE REDID THE WILL.”
The pen was still lying across the quitclaim deed. Nobody touched it.
Jamie squared the pages against the table, slowly, edge by edge, and looked at me for the first time all day.
“Lana,” he said. “What else did she have you read?”
The back pages
“Everything you’re holding,” I said. “Turn past the signatures.”
He didn’t. Stefanie took the pages back from him and turned them herself.
Two more sheets were stapled behind the hospital’s last page. The first was a deed, Mom to me, the building and the lot, dated March third, with the county’s red recording stamp from the next morning. The second was one paragraph on Alan’s letterhead. The hospital’s agreement went with the property. Whoever held the deed closed the sale.
That was all she’d had me read. Three pages, once, with her walker against my hip.
Drew set the lint roller on top of a dryer.
“So it’s hers,” he said. “The whole three million.”
“Three million one forty,” Stefanie said. She was still reading.
Jamie stood up. He’s six-two, and he likes to stand up in small rooms.
“She called you by a dead man’s name at Christmas,” he said to Drew. “She threw the remote at the TV. And three weeks before she died she sat up in bed and sold the corner to a hospital?”
“She did,” I said.
“There’s a word for that, Lana. Undue influence. A daughter with the keys and the pills and the lawyer’s number.”
Stefanie reached for the quitclaim. I put my hand flat on it first.
“That’s got my name on it,” I said.
She let go. She gathered the bank statements instead, both rows, and squared them into her purse.
Jamie stopped at the door with his car keys out.
“Keep the paper,” he said. “You’ll be signing something by July.”
Thirty-two books
Mom bought the laundromat in 1994 with Dad’s buyout from the railroad shops. He died in 2003, and she ran it alone after that, seven days a week.
Every morning at six she fed the change machine its twenties and wrote the count in a spiral notebook from the drugstore. One line for the money, one line for the day.
“$300 IN. NO HOT WATER 9 TO 12. JAMIE CALLED, WANTS THE TRUCK.”
One notebook a year. She stapled the bank’s deposit slip to each page. When a book filled up it went in a liquor box in the closet upstairs, and the new one went in the drawer under the register, on top of the screwdriver.
Nobody but Mom ever read them. Jamie called them her diaries and made fun of the spelling.
When she got sick, the books didn’t stop.
On her bad days I fed the machine and wrote the count, in my handwriting, slanted, and read it back to her upstairs. She’d make me recount it anyway. On her good days she came down on the walker and wrote it herself, in those square capitals, pressing so hard the next two pages carried it.
Stefanie used to call every second Sunday. She sent the Mother’s Day lilies. She was the one who got the funeral home their paperwork before I’d hung up the phone with the hospice nurse. In our family, Stefanie was the one who took care of things.
In January a man in a gray pickup parked across the street and took pictures of the building with his phone. Then he came in and asked for the owner.
“You’re looking at her,” Mom said, from the folding chair by the register.
He left a card. Two weeks later he came back. I was upstairs changing her sheets and only heard the bell over the door, twice.
After he left, Mom tucked his card in that month’s book without showing it to me.
“If he comes back while I’m napping,” she said, “tell him no.”
He didn’t come back. In March she died.
The Thursday they took the money, I locked up after them, put the quitclaim in the drawer on top of this year’s book, and went upstairs.
The boiler was still dead. I slept in my coat with the envelope under my pillow.
Kaitlyn from the hospital
The lawyer’s letter came Monday, from Pittsburgh, where Jamie lives.
Jamie and Drew were petitioning to set aside the March third will and the March third deed. Lack of capacity. Undue influence by a caregiver with “exclusive access to the decedent and her medications.” A copy had gone to the hospital.
Tuesday morning a woman named Kaitlyn called from the hospital’s real estate office. She’d been the one who brought the agreement to Alan in the first place.
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” she said. “She was a pistol on the phone.”
Then she told me what the copy meant. The hospital couldn’t close on a lot with a lawsuit on the title. The agreement had a date in it. If the title wasn’t clear by July first, the hospital could walk away and put the garage exit on the other corner, where the gas station is.
“Nobody would get anything,” I said.
“Nobody would get three million,” she said. “You’d still have a laundromat.”
Drew called that night. He’d signed on with Jamie.
“It’s just fair, Lana,” he said. “Jamie says a judge splits it three ways, that’s a million each. Mom would want it even.”
“Mom wrote the will.”
“Mom was on four different pills.”
So on Wednesday I drove two hours to Pittsburgh. I’d been up all night with a calculator, and I had an offer. Five hundred thousand each, out of the closing, if they dropped the petition before July.
Stefanie answered the door. Jamie stayed in the kitchen. I said it standing on their mat, because she didn’t ask me in.
Stefanie heard me out. Then she turned and called down the hall.
“Jamie. She’s offering us half a million apiece.”
“Now she’s offering,” Jamie said from the kitchen.
Stefanie looked at me the way she’d looked at the bank statements.
“People don’t offer money they’re sure of, Lana,” she said. “You’re scared. We’ll see you in front of a judge.”
Marchand Property Solutions
I got back to the shop after dark and didn’t turn on the overheads. Number nine was dripping into the bucket.
I took the quitclaim out of the drawer. I was going to tear it up. I’d never read the top of it, just the line with my name.
The grantee was typed in capitals across the top of the page.
MARCHAND PROPERTY SOLUTIONS LLC.
Stefanie’s cousin’s husband had a company. Fine. People who flip houses have companies.
But I knew that word from somewhere, the shape of it, and I stood there with the deed in the light from the street until I had it.
I went up the back stairs and pulled the liquor box out of the closet. This year’s January book was on top.
The card fell out when I opened it. White, a little bent. NELSON MARCHAND. MARCHAND PROPERTY SOLUTIONS. A phone number with a Hollidaysburg exchange.
Mom’s capitals on the ninth of January:
“$320 IN. MAN IN GRAY TRUCK TOOK PICTURES OF MY BUILDING.”
And on the twenty-third:
“$300 IN. MARCHAND CAME BACK. OFFERED 90 CASH AS-IS. SAYS HE’S FAMILY. STEFANIE’S COUSIN’S HUSBAND. SAID NO.”
Under that, smaller, in the same pen:
“HOSPITAL CALLED AT 3. WANTS TO TALK ABOUT THE LOT. CALL ALAN.”
I sat down on the closet floor.
Stefanie’s man had offered my mother ninety thousand dollars. The hospital called her that afternoon.
March third, six o’clock
I didn’t sleep. At ten to six I went downstairs and did what Mom did. I unlocked the machine, fed it twenties from the bank bag, and wrote the count in this year’s book.
Then I turned back to March.
Most of February and March was me. My slant, my blue ballpoint. “$200 IN. MOM BAD TODAY. THREW REMOTE.” “$240 IN. TUB, THEN SLEPT ALL DAY.” I’d written down every bad day she had, because she wanted the count, and the count came with a line.
March third was hers. Square capitals, pressed through two pages.
“$400 IN. CORRECT.”
The deposit slip stapled under it said four hundred.
“ALAN AT 9. SENT LANA DOWN TO DO MRS YEUNG’S COMFORTERS SO SHE DON’T HAVE TO SAY SHE HEARD.”
“SIGNED WITH THE HOSPITAL. 3,140,000. MARCHAND OFFERED 90 FOR IT. FAMILY.”
“THE BOYS GET THE BANK. THEY’LL TAKE IT AND GO. LET THEM.”
“THE CORNER IS LANA’S. SHE STAYED.”
I read it the way she told me to read the envelope. One time.
The crane swung past the front window. I sat at the folding table until it came back the other way.
At seven I took both books and the quitclaim and the card to the copy place on Plank Road, and I copied all of them. Every page of the last three years. Every bad day, the tub, the remote, the morning she didn’t know me. I mailed one set to Jamie’s lawyer in Pittsburgh and walked another into Alan’s office.
Then I called Jamie and got his voicemail.
“Monday at ten,” I said. “At the shop. Bring Stefanie. Bring Drew.”
Monday morning I left the March book open on the folding table and unlocked the front door.
The folding table
They came at ten past. Jamie had the petition in a folder. Drew had the same funeral slacks on. Stefanie came in last and didn’t take her coat off.
I’d laid it out in a row. The quitclaim. The card. The January book open to the twenty-third. The March book open to the third.
Jamie read the quitclaim first, because it was closest to him. He read the top of it. Then he picked up the card.
“Stef,” he said.
“Nelson’s a professional,” Stefanie said. “He looks at every corner in Blair County. That’s his job, Jamie. He looks at properties.”
“He came here twice.”
“He came here because I asked him to give your mother a fair number before that roof fell in on her. Do you know what a building like this costs to keep? Do you know what she’d have gotten from a regular buyer with that boiler?”
“Ninety thousand,” Drew said. He had the January book.
“It was a starting number. That’s how it works.”
“The hospital called her that same afternoon,” I said.
Stefanie turned on me.
“And she sat on it. She sat on three million dollars under a crane and told nobody, not her own sons. She was going to give it to you, to sit up here with your pills and your notebooks. Somebody in this family had to think about the money. Nobody else was going to. You think Jamie was? Jamie can’t balance a checkbook. I did the funeral. I did the flowers. I did the statements. I’ve been doing this family’s paperwork for twenty years, and I’m supposed to watch her hand a three-million-dollar lot to the one who did her laundry?”
Nobody said anything.
Jamie put the card down on the folding table, face up.
“You told me Nelson was doing us a favor,” he said.
“I was doing you a favor.”
Drew had turned to March. He read it with his lips moving, the way he used to read the cereal box.
“Four hundred,” he said. “Correct.”
“Drew,” Stefanie said.
“She got the count right. The slip says four hundred.” He looked at Jamie. “She knew which customer had the comforters. She knew Mrs. Yeung’s name.”
“She knew Marchand’s name,” I said.
Drew closed the March book. He picked up his lint roller from the top of the dryer, where it had been sitting since Thursday, and put it in his jacket pocket.
“I’m calling the lawyer,” he said. “I’m off it.”
“Off what?” Stefanie said. “It’s a million dollars. Each.”
“Your lawyer has all of it already,” I said to Jamie. “Every page. January too.”
Stefanie stared at me.
“You sent them her bad days? You sent a lawyer your mother in the bathtub?”
“Yes.”
Jamie stood there a long time with his hand on the petition folder. Then he picked it up and tucked it under his arm.
“Get in the car, Stef,” he said.
“Jamie.”
“Get in the car.”
She went. At the door Jamie stopped, the same place he’d stopped on Thursday.
“Keep the corner, Lana,” he said. “You stayed.”
July first
The petition came off the title on April twentieth. The hospital closed on the last day of June.
The washers went to a man from Hollidaysburg who runs two laundromats on the other side of the mountain. I sold him the dryers too. He wanted the change machine and I told him it wasn’t for sale.
It took me most of the morning with a socket wrench to get it off the wall. Four bolts, rusted into the block.
My boxes were in the car. The apartment upstairs was empty except for the liquor box of books, which was coming with me. Drew sent a card in May with a picture of his kids on it. Jamie hasn’t called.
The folding table was the last thing left in the room.
Across the street the crane swung past the front window. In September it would be swinging over this corner.
I sat down at the table and opened this year’s book to the next clean page. I pressed hard, so it would go through.
“JULY 1. $0 IN. CORRECT.”
If someone in your family did the stairs and the tub for years while everybody else was busy, send this to them tonight.
For more stories about family members making money and property painfully complicated, read about a husband claiming the gym his wife built and a mother charging one child rent while another lived free. There’s also the unsettling tale of a son-in-law asking for money at a funeral lunch.
