My brothers took the bank key off my mother’s hospice tray while she was still breathing, drove it downtown at ten to five, and read me her will on speakerphone from the lobby. “House, farm ground, the $212,000, every dime to us,” Keith said. “The help already got paid.” Then Brent found the photo.
Mom had been in a rented hospital bed in my front room for fourteen months, and the nurse had given her a week.
I’d cut down to three days a week at the pharmacy counter so I could do her nights.
Brent and Keith had come by four times between them. Keith stayed long enough to charge his phone.
At 4:52 on Friday his name lit up my screen.
I was at the end table filling her pill organizer for the weekend.
Ashanti, the hospice nurse, had left her crossword book on the recliner, open to a puzzle she’d done in pen.
“You’re on speaker,” Keith said. “Brent’s here. Say hi, Brent.”
“Hi, help,” Brent said.
Behind them a woman said the lobby closed at five, and Keith told her they’d be quick.
“Where are you?” I said.
“The bank. Mom’s box. OUR box, technically.”
I looked at the tray by her bed.
The little brass key on the green yarn was gone.
Mom put Keith on that box the year Dad died, because he lived closest then. He hadn’t lived in Ottumwa for eleven years.
“She’s asleep six feet from me, Keith.”
“Yeah, well. They said days. We’re getting ahead of it.”
Paper rustled. Brent cleared his throat like somebody handed him a microphone at a wedding.
“I, Jean Whitaker, being of sound mind, blah blah,” he read. “Here we go. The house, the farm ground and all accounts to my sons, Brent and Keith, in equal shares.”
“And me?” I said.
“Hang on, there’s a line.” Keith was laughing before he got to the end of it. “My daughter Dana has been compensated for her care.”
“Compensated,” Brent said. “That’s the casseroles.”
I had the Friday night slot open. Two of the small white ones and the half tab.
I set the lid down without snapping it shut.
“Oh, there’s more,” Keith said. “Show her, Brent. Wait. She can’t see. Describe it.”
“It’s the porch picture,” Brent said. “Christmas ’91. All five of us on the steps.”
“Except there’s a hole in it,” Keith said. “Right where you were standing. Neat little oval. Looks like Mom did it with her nail scissors.”
Brent laughed so hard he coughed.
“Even Mom cut you out, Dana.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We’re listing the house Monday,” Brent said. “Your key stops working Monday too. Whatever junk of yours is still in the basement, it goes to the curb.”
“She is not dead, Brent.”
“Nobody said she was. We’re saving you the trouble.”
The woman in the lobby said gentlemen, she needed to lock the door.
Mom’s hand moved on the blanket.
Her purse hung on the bedpost, where she liked it, so she could see it.
I took out her wallet and opened it to the clear window behind her license.
My face was in there.
Twelve years old, bangs I’d cut myself in the bathroom, trimmed down to a neat little oval.
She did it in 2009, the morning I drove her to her first chemo. She said she wanted somebody in the waiting room with her who’d actually show up.
That wasn’t the part that made my hands go steady, though.
Last Tuesday, Cecil Nowak sat at my kitchen table for an hour and a half with his briefcase and a notary named Lynne Dietrich.
Mom signed four pages with my good pen.
Cecil asked me to go wait on the porch, so I did.
I don’t know what’s on them. Nobody told me, and I didn’t ask.
“Keith,” I said. “Read me the date at the bottom.”
“What?”
“The date. Last page, bottom. Read it out loud.”
More paper. Then nothing for a few seconds but the woman’s keys.
“April ninth,” he said. “2011. So what?”
“So she signed a NEW ONE on TUESDAY. At MY KITCHEN TABLE. With a lawyer and a notary sitting right there.”
“Bullshit,” Brent said. “She can’t hold a fork.”
“She held my pen fine.”
Keith’s voice went up the way it used to when he was nine and losing at cards. “Then WHERE IS IT, Dana? What does it say?”
“I don’t know. Cecil made me wait outside.”
Brent said something to Keith I couldn’t make out.
A chair scraped on tile.
Mom opened her eyes.
She looked at the phone in my hand and held her fingers out for it, the way she used to want the TV remote.
I gave it to her.
It took her three breaths to get started.
“Keith, honey,” she said. “You still at the bank?”
“Mom? Mom, we were just…”
“Good. Ask the lady for the other box.”
Number eighty-eight
“What other box?” Keith said. “Mom. What other box?”
She didn’t answer him. She held the phone on her chest with both hands and looked at the ceiling like she was waiting on a bus.
Then the woman’s voice came up close to the phone.
“Mrs. Whitaker? It’s Simone at the window.”
“Hi, honey,” Mom said. “Tell him.”
“Sir, there’s a second box under your mother’s name. Number eighty-eight.” Her keys moved. “You’re not on that one.”
“Who is?” Keith said.
“Jean Whitaker and Dana Whitaker. Since March of 2009.”
“That’s not,” Brent said. “Since when does she even…”
“Since March of 2009, sir. And we’re closed.”
Mom held the phone out to me. Her hand shook, but she didn’t drop it.
“Your ring,” she said. “The little one.”
Then she shut her eyes, and her breathing went back to the slow kind.
On the speaker Keith said, “Don’t you touch it, Dana. Nine o’clock Monday. We’ll be standing at the door.” The line went dead.
My keys hang on a hook by the front door. I took them down and sat on the arm of the recliner, next to Ashanti’s crossword.
Car key. House key. The key to my locker at the pharmacy. And a small flat brass one I’d carried for sixteen years, because Mom told me it was the spare for her cedar chest.
That cedar chest has never had a lock on it.
The bank on Main, March 2009
Her first chemo was at nine-thirty at the hospital. At a quarter to eight she had me pull over downtown.
“Ten minutes,” she said. “I need you to sign something.”
Inside, a man in a short-sleeved shirt put a card in front of me. Mom had already signed the top line. She’d filled in my birthday and my address herself.
“In case I can’t sign my own checks,” she said.
I was watching the clock over the teller windows. I signed where his finger was and didn’t read one word of it.
Out in my car she took the porch picture out of her purse. Christmas 1991, all five of us on the steps of the farmhouse, Dad in his good coat, Brent with his arm hooked around Keith’s neck, me in front with the bangs.
She got her nail scissors out of the zipper pocket and cut around my face. She went slow. The engine was running and she made me wait till she was done.
Then she slid the oval behind her license, and she said what she said about the waiting room.
The last thing she did in that parking lot was work a little brass key onto my ring. It split her thumbnail.
“Spare for the cedar chest,” she said. “Don’t lose it.”
I didn’t think about it again. I had a mother with cancer.
Brent farmed our ground then. He paid her the rent once a year, every November, with a check he made out in capital letters, the way he’s written since grade school. She’d stick it on the fridge under the John Deere magnet for a week so everybody could see he paid.
Keith still lived in town. Sundays he came over and we played gin at her kitchen table, and he cheated, and she let him.
In April of 2011, Brent drove her to Des Moines on a Saturday to see a man about the ground.
She came home that night and went to bed without supper. She was bald under her scarf, and she slept till noon on Sunday.
I asked her what the man said.
“That’s Brent’s business,” she said.
At 11:48 Friday night, with her pills in the organizer and her breathing slow, my phone buzzed on the end table.
Keith. Bring the little key Monday or we bring a lawyer.
Saturday, 7:10 a.m.
Brent’s truck was in my driveway before Ashanti’s car.
It was the first time either of them had been in my house since the Fourth of July.
Brent didn’t sit. He stood at the foot of the hospital bed with his hands in his jacket and looked at Mom the way you look at a used car on a lot.
Keith went to the window and looked at his phone.
“We talked to Walt last night,” Brent said. “Walt Gomez. He did Mom’s will in ’11.”
I was measuring her morning syrup into the little cup.
“Here’s what Walt says. You’ve had a woman on morphine in your front room for fourteen months. Nobody sees her but you. Then a lawyer shows up and she signs something at your table, with your pen.” He counted it on his fingers. “Walt says a judge has a word for that.”
“Undue influence,” Keith said. He didn’t look up from his phone.
“So Monday, whatever’s in that box comes out on the table where we can all see it,” Brent said. “And Tuesday’s pages go in the trash. Or we file the day after she goes.”
Ashanti came in with her bag and stopped in the doorway.
“Who’s this?” Brent said.
“Hospice,” Ashanti said.
She went around him to the bed and put the cuff on Mom’s arm.
“I chart her every visit,” she said. “Tuesday she told me the date, and who the governor is, and that I spell my name with an i on the end.”
“You’re paid by the hour in this house,” Brent said.
“I’m paid by hospice. Dana doesn’t pay me a dime.”
Brent looked at me like I’d hired her for the morning.
I tried the only thing I had. “Stay,” I said. “Both of you. Sit with her today. She’d know you were here.”
“And give you a roomful of witnesses who’ll say we saw her doing fine?” Brent said. “Nice try.”
Keith came to the bed then. He bent down close to Mom’s face.
“Mom. Did Dana make you sign something?”
She didn’t open her eyes. Her mouth moved and nothing came out.
“See,” Brent said.
They went out without shutting it. The storm door banged twice, and the cold came across the room to her bed.
Cecil Nowak, Sunday at two
I called Cecil Nowak at home Sunday morning. His card had been on my fridge since Tuesday.
He came at two, in a sweater, no briefcase, and sat in the same kitchen chair as before.
“I can’t tell you what’s in them,” he said before I asked. “She’s alive. They’re hers.”
“Brent says they’re going to say I made her.”
“Brent can say it.” He turned his coffee cup around by the handle. “That’s why you were on the porch. That’s why Lynne was here. That’s why I asked your mother questions for forty minutes before she picked up your pen.”
“Is that enough?”
“It’s a lot. It doesn’t stop a man who wants to file.”
He looked through the doorway at the front room. Mom was asleep with her mouth open and her purse on the bedpost.
“There’s one thing I can tell you,” he said. “She told me I could, if you ever asked about Des Moines.”
I hadn’t asked about Des Moines. I said I was asking.
“She brought the 2011 will to my office in June of that year. Walt Gomez’s paper, not mine. She wanted to know if it could be undone.”
“And?”
“I told her any day she liked. She said not while Brent had the ground.”
I sat there and did it on my fingers the way Brent had.
Fifteen years. Fifteen Novembers of a check on the fridge.
“Fifteen years,” I said.
“She said you’d be mad about that part.” He stood up and got his coat off the back of the chair. “She also said Monday, you go in that booth by yourself. Not with them.”
At the door he stopped with his hand on the storm door.
“By yourself,” he said. “She said it twice.”
Booth 2, Monday, 9:04
The lobby had four teller windows, a fake ficus and a sign about CD rates.
Brent and Keith were at the little table by the door with gas station coffee. Brent had a manila envelope under his hand. A corner of the porch picture stuck out of it.
Simone was about my age, with reading glasses on a chain. She pulled a card out of a long drawer and turned it around for me.
My signature from 2009, jammed up against the line because I’d been watching the clock. Mom’s above it, big and sure.
“I’ll come back with her,” Brent said.
“Renters only, sir,” Simone said, and she walked me back.
Booth 2 is a closet with a shelf and a chair. She turned her key in the wall, I turned mine, and she slid the box out and set it on the shelf and shut the door behind her.
It was lighter than I thought it would be.
One manila folder. On top of it, a white envelope with DANA across it in Mom’s writing.
I opened the folder first.
Typed pages with a Des Moines address at the top. Walter Gomez, Attorney at Law. DRAFT stamped across the first page in red. It was the will Keith read me Friday, word for word, except one line wasn’t typed in yet.
In the margin next to the space where it goes, in blue ballpoint capitals:
ADD. DANA HAS BEEN COMPENSATED FOR HER CARE. SHE WON’T FIGHT IT. B.
I know those capitals. I looked at them on my mother’s fridge every November for fifteen years.
Paper-clipped to the back was a sheet of yellow legal paper in the same hand.
MOM. SIGN WALT’S BY THE 9TH OR GET SOMEBODY ELSE TO FARM IT. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
The ninth. April ninth.
Then I opened the envelope. One page in her writing, dated June 2011, the month she went to Cecil.
Dana. I signed what Brent wanted because I could not lose the rent with the chemo bills coming. I am keeping his papers here where he cannot get at them. You are on this box so you can always get at them.
There was one more line at the bottom, in a different pen, like she’d come back to it another day.
If they ever say you made me do something, show them who did.
The little table by the door
I put the box back and Simone locked it. I carried the folder out to the table and sat down in the empty chair.
I slid the draft across to Keith with the margin up.
“Read me that,” I said.
Keith read it out loud. He slowed down at COMPENSATED. He stopped at the B.
“That’s a note,” Brent said. “Lawyers write notes all day. Clients write notes. She signed the typed one, didn’t she? Nobody held a gun on her.”
I turned the yellow sheet over and put it on top.
Keith read that one to himself. Then he read it again.
“Okay,” Brent said. “Okay. So I leaned on her. You know what I had in ’11? Hail in July and the bank on my back and a mother who’d have handed you the whole place because you drove her to her appointments. I paid her rent every November for thirty years. On time. Who do you think kept that farm in the family?”
Simone was at her window, counting a drawer. She’d stopped counting.
“Here’s what we do,” Brent said. “Walt can make this quiet. You give me that folder. You call Cecil and tell him Tuesday’s a mistake, she was confused, whatever. And you get a third. Seventy thousand, cash, the week she goes.”
He leaned in.
“You don’t even know what Tuesday says, Dana. She could’ve left you the casserole dish. Seventy’s real money.”
Seventy was more than I’d made at the counter in the last two years put together.
“You said she asked you,” Keith said to him. “You said she called you crying and asked you to fix it.”
“She did call me crying.”
“After this.” Keith put one finger on the yellow paper.
“What do you want me to say, Keith? I want the ground. I always wanted the ground. She was going to give it to the help.”
Keith sat back. He looked at the porch picture sticking out of the envelope for a long time.
Then he looked at me.
“Seventy’s fair, Dana,” he said. “Take it.”
“No,” I said.
“Then Walt files,” Brent said.
“Then this goes in the same file.” I put the yellow sheet back in the folder. “Cecil gets it at ten.”
Brent laughed, but it came out short. “Walt won’t touch a contest with that in the drawer, and you know it.”
I reached over and pulled the porch picture out of his envelope.
“That’s estate property,” Brent said.
“She’s not dead, Brent.”
Ten to five, December
Mom died the second Thursday after that, at ten after four in the morning, on my shift. I had her hand. Ashanti came at six and did the paperwork in pen.
Cecil read the Tuesday pages at my kitchen table the week after the funeral. Brent listened on speaker from Walt’s office. Keith didn’t call in.
She split it three ways. The house, the farm ground, the $212,000. She named me to handle it. She left me the porch picture by name, both pieces.
Brent hung up before Cecil got to the last page.
Keith’s third went to him by mail in Cedar Rapids. He cashed it the day it came. He hasn’t called. The deck we played gin with is still in her kitchen drawer at the house, and I left it there for the buyers.
The oval went back in with a strip of tape on the back. She’d cut so slow the edges still met.
On a Friday in December I drove downtown at ten to five and gave Simone the little brass key.
She slid a card across to close out box eighty-eight. Mom’s name was already printed at the top.
I signed under it, and this time I read every word first.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s doing the nights for a parent right now.
Family betrayals have a way of surfacing at the worst moments – see what happened in “My Husband Found My Row With Our Anniversary Watch in His Fist” and “My Husband Wanted My Phone, and Boarding Closed in Fifty Minutes”. For another story about a family keepsake with a secret attached, read “I Had Fifty Stickers on My Closet Door. My Uncle Had One.”.
