My sister told a judge I wasn’t fit to look after our own mother, and in the hallway she leaned in and said, “Start packing, Kerri. That house is worth $465,000 and I’m not splitting it with a tow-truck driver.” By two o’clock the judge agreed with her. Then Mom reached into her cardigan pocket.
I’ve lived with Mom for six years, since the fall that broke her wrist.
Adrienne lives four hours away. She calls on birthdays, mostly.
Courtroom 4 at the Kittitas County courthouse. Every head in the gallery kept drifting my way.
I’m six foot one, shaved head, arms inked shoulder to wrist.
Adrienne sat at the other table in a cream suit, beside a $400-an-hour lawyer.
Mom sat next to me in her red cardigan, holding two of my fingers under the table the way she did at crosswalks.
She wasn’t afraid of me. She watched the bench.
The judge peered at me above his reading glasses like I’d tracked oil onto his carpet.
The lawyer said “tow yard” four times. He said Mom deserved a SAFE, STABLE home.
“Look at her, Your Honor,” Adrienne said. “Would you leave your mother with that?”
I did NOT argue. If I opened my mouth I’d hand her the whole thing.
The judge cut him off. “I’ve heard enough.”
The house would be listed. Mom would go to a care facility in thirty days.
He brought the gavel down.
The bailiff came to walk Mom out to Adrienne’s car. One of his shoelaces was undone.
I let go first.
Then she did something I’d never seen her do.
Mom got to her feet.
“HOLD ON A MINUTE,” she said, louder than I’d heard her in years.
The room went quiet. She pulled a folded page from her pocket, yellow at the creases, and walked past the bailiff to the bench.
He rolled his eyes and held out his hand for it.
A sheet from a spiral notebook. A pencil map, two lines of her slanted handwriting.
He read it twice. The color left his face until the page shook in his fingers.
He looked at Adrienne, and Adrienne STOPPED SMILING.
He leaned into the microphone. “Mrs. Pedersen,” he said. “Is this your daughter’s…”
The plate on the map
“…license plate?”
Mom didn’t sit back down. She stood at the rail in front of the bench with her good hand flat on the wood. The left one.
“It’s her car,” she said. “The white one. I wrote the number off the bumper with the porch light off, so she wouldn’t see me do it.”
He turned the page around so Adrienne’s lawyer could see it. He didn’t let go of it.
I could read it upside down from my chair.
Our street was two pencil lines. Our house was a box with an X for the front door. Across the street was another box with PFEIFFER printed in it, and in front of that a little rectangle with seven letters and numbers beside it.
Under the map were her two lines.
Adrienne parks here when Kerri is out on night calls. Feb 11, Feb 25, Mar 4, Mar 18. She tells me not to tell Kerri.
I hadn’t known about one of those nights. Not one.
The judge pulled a stapled packet off his stack and opened it to a page with a yellow flag sticking out.
“Ms. Kostas,” he said. “Your declaration, which you swore to, says you were last in your mother’s home on Thanksgiving Day.”
Her lawyer started to get up. Adrienne beat him to it.
“That’s right, Your Honor.”
“It also says your mother can no longer keep track of dates.”
“She can’t. That’s the whole point. Look at that thing. She’s drawing maps of cars.”
Mom didn’t turn around to look at her.
“Tuesday, the eighteenth of March,” she said. “Nine-fifteen at night. She brought a pumpkin pie from Safeway in March and never took her coat off.”
Somebody in the gallery laughed once and stopped.
He kept his eyes on that sheet a long while. Then he laid the gavel on its side, the way you set down a wrench you just used on the wrong bolt.
“The order I just made is vacated,” he said. “We’ll continue this in fourteen days. Mrs. Pedersen goes home with the daughter she came in with.”
The bailiff stepped back.
“Ms. Kostas, you’ll bring every document your mother has signed since January first. Every one.”
Her lawyer wrote that down. Adrienne didn’t write anything.
She was out the side door before the clerk had the next file open.
In the hallway Mom took two of my fingers again. She was shaking now, after. That’s how she does everything.
“There’s more pages,” she said.
“Where?”
“Under the peas,” she said. “Don’t let them thaw.”
Twenty-three notebooks from Bi-Mart
Six years ago, in February, Mom went out to the mailbox in her house slippers, and the driveway was ice.
She caught herself on her right hand. The wrist broke in three places and healed like a bent hinge. She can hold a coffee cup with it. She can’t close her fingers around a pen.
I was in Moses Lake then, in a rental with a furnace that only worked if you kicked it, driving for a yard that paid by the hook.
I came over for the surgery. I never went back.
The occupational therapist was a girl with a ponytail who called everybody “my friend.” She handed Mom a spiral notebook and told her to write with her left hand every day. Anything at all. The weather. What she had for lunch.
“Your brain’s going to fight you,” she said. “Let it.”
Mom bought a five-pack of spiral notebooks at Bi-Mart that same afternoon. Then another five-pack. There are twenty-three of them on the shelf in the sewing room now, and one more that lives in her cardigan.
The first ones look like a second grader wrote them. The letters lean so far over they’re almost lying down.
By the second year they stand up a little. They still lean. That’s the slant.
She writes the weather. What the deer ate off the roses. How many tows I went out on and what time I came home. I never read them. They’re hers.
That fall the credit union made her come in and redo her signature card, because her old signature didn’t exist anymore. A woman named Ms. Wang sat with her for forty minutes while she practiced it on scrap paper. Mom brought her a loaf of zucchini bread the next week.
Mom also got the mail herself, every day at two. Down the driveway with the cane, open the box, back up. It was her walk. I didn’t take it from her.
The house is the one Dad bought in 1979 for $41,000. Three bedrooms, green carpet in the hall, a chest freezer in the garage.
Dad kept cash in a Folgers can in that freezer, under the frozen peas. He said nobody robs a freezer. He died in 2014 and the can is still out there. Mom keeps her emergency two hundred in it.
I took a job with the yard in Ellensburg. Days, plus two nights a week on call. The nights paid an extra thirteen hundred a month, and that thirteen hundred is the property tax and the furnace and Mom’s eye drops that insurance won’t touch.
Adrienne went to college in Bellingham and stayed on the wet side of the mountains. She married a man who sells commercial insurance. They have a three-car garage outside Vancouver and a lawn service.
Mother’s Day, she sends flowers. The card is always in the florist’s handwriting.
Last Thanksgiving she drove over the pass for the first time in two years. She brought a pie from a store and a white binder with colored tabs.
“Estate planning,” she said at the kitchen table. “I just want to make sure Kerri isn’t stuck figuring all this out by herself if something happens. Where do you keep the deed, Mom?”
“Hall closet,” Mom said. “Your father’s folder.”
Adrienne got up and went to look at it right then, with her pie still on her plate.
Dad’s folder is a brown accordion file with an elastic strap. The deed. His death certificate. Mom’s old checkbook registers. A stack of canceled checks from the nineties, held together with a rubber band, that Dad never threw out because Dad never threw anything out.
Adrienne pulled one of the old checks and held it up to the light.
“Look at your old signature,” she said. “That S. You signed like a movie star.”
The old S had a loop on it the size of a nickel. The P stood up straight.
“I can’t make that S anymore,” Mom said.
“I know, Mom.”
Then she sat back down and asked who was getting the house.
Mom put her fork down. “Kerri’s here,” she said. That was all.
Adrienne smiled and wrote something in the binder. Then she asked me how much a tow paid at three in the morning, and if I ever worried about leaving Mom alone on those nights. I told her about the thirteen hundred. I told her Mom had her phone, and the Pfeiffers were right across the street.
She wrote that down too.
I thought she was being careful. I thought she was helping.
Driving home from the courthouse, Mom held the folded map in her lap with both hands and didn’t say a word.
I pulled into the driveway at a quarter to three. She had her seat belt off before I had the engine off, and she was headed for the garage.
Under the peas
The freezer lid came up stiff, the way it always does.
Under two bags of frozen peas there was a gallon freezer bag. Inside it were four pages torn out of a spiral notebook, folded in half, and one envelope from the credit union, still sealed.
Mom took the envelope out and held it against her chest.
“That’s mine,” she said. “We’ll get to that.”
She unfolded the pages on top of the freezer and smoothed them flat with her left hand.
The handwriting was the same lean as the map. Every page had a date.
Feb 11. A. here 9 pm. Parked at Pfeiffers. Wanted to see my license to “update the county.” Said don’t tell K, K will think I’m checking up on her.
Feb 25. A. here. Papers for the senior tax exemption. I signed 2 places. I read it. She was in the hall closet a long time.
Mar 4. A. took Dad’s folder out to her car. Brought it back in 20 min. Said she needed copies.
Mar 18. A. says save all mail from the credit union for her. Don’t open it. Pie.
I read them twice. My hands were cold from the freezer and I didn’t notice until later.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She asked me not to,” Mom said. “She’s my daughter too. And then she was in the closet, and I started writing it down.”
“What’s in the envelope, Mom?”
“I don’t know. It came on the ninth of April. I put it in here the same day.”
“Let’s open it.”
“No.” She put it in her cardigan pocket with the map. “It’s addressed to me. I’m going to open it in front of somebody from the credit union, so nobody can ever say I didn’t understand what it said.”
That was the whole case against her, sitting on top of a freezer. A woman who supposedly couldn’t keep track of dates had a dated log and a plan.
Adrienne called at seven that night. I put her on speaker on the counter so Mom could hear.
“Do you understand what you did today?” she said. “You coached a seventy-eight-year-old woman to draw a map of my car. That’s what you did.”
“I didn’t know about the map.”
“Oh, come on, Kerri. She can’t work the remote. And she’s tracking license plates? In two weeks my lawyer is going to stand her up and ask her what year it is, and she’s going to cry in front of everybody, and you did that to her. Not me.”
“You told the judge Thanksgiving.”
“I don’t have to explain my visits to my own mother to a woman who sleeps in her house for free. I’m doing this FOR her. Somebody in this family has to.”
Mom stood at the sink with her back to the phone. She didn’t move the whole call.
“Bring her notebooks,” Adrienne said. “All of them. If she’s so sharp, let’s see what’s in them.”
She hung up.
After Mom went to bed I got a flashlight and opened the hall closet.
Dad’s folder was where it always is, on the shelf above the vacuum. The elastic strap was on. The deed was in the first pocket. His death certificate was in the second. The checkbook registers were all there, 1981 to 2003.
The rubber band was still in the back pocket.
There used to be a stack of old checks in it as thick as a sandwich. There were three left.
Ms. Wang’s office
The credit union opens at nine. We were in the parking lot at eight-forty, Mom with her purse on her lap and the envelope on top of the purse.
Ms. Wang still runs the branch. She came out of her office before we got to the counter, because she’d seen Mom through the window.
“Sherry,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“I need to open some mail,” Mom said.
We sat in the two chairs in front of Ms. Wang’s desk. Mom slid her thumb under the flap and tore it slowly, the way she opens Christmas cards so she can keep the envelope.
She read it. Then she turned it around and set it in front of me.
HOME EQUITY LINE OF CREDIT. Borrower: Sherry Pedersen. Property: our address. Credit limit, $160,000. Current balance, $151,400.00. Minimum payment due April 15, $1,212.38. PAST DUE.
I read the balance three times. It didn’t change.
The house was paid off in 2004. Dad burned the mortgage papers in the grill on the back deck and Mom took a picture of it.
“Can you show us how this got opened?” I said.
Ms. Wang looked at Mom first. Mom nodded.
She typed for a while. Her face did something small and she straightened it out.
“The line was opened February twenty-seventh,” she said. “The documents were notarized on the twenty-fifth. The notary is in Clark County.”
“That’s Vancouver,” I said.
“It is.”
Mom hasn’t been over the pass since the fall. Her doctors are in Ellensburg. Her church is in Ellensburg. The farthest she’s been in six years is the Costco in Union Gap.
“There were four transfers in March,” Ms. Wang said. “To an account at another bank. Forty thousand. Forty thousand. Fifty thousand. Twenty-one thousand four hundred.”
“Whose account?”
Ms. Wang didn’t answer that. She scrolled down.
“There’s also a durable power of attorney on file, dated March fourth. It names Adrienne Kostas as your agent, Sherry. For financial matters.”
Mom didn’t say anything.
“Can I see the page where she signed?” Mom said finally.
Ms. Wang turned the monitor a little. I couldn’t see it from my angle. Mom looked at it for a long time.
“Can I have a copy of that,” Mom said. “And a copy of my signature card. The one we did.”
Ms. Wang printed both. Mom folded them together and put them in her cardigan pocket, with the envelope and the map. That pocket was getting full.
“Freeze it,” I said. “Whatever’s left on the line. Freeze it today.”
Ms. Wang folded her hands.
“Kerri, I can’t take instructions on this account from you. You’re not on it.”
“Then from her.”
“Sherry, I can flag it, and I will. I’ll send it up to our fraud people this morning. But there’s an agent on file under a power of attorney. When there’s an inquiry like this, policy says I notify the agent.”
“You’re going to call Adrienne,” I said.
“I’m required to call Adrienne.”
“She’s the one who…”
“Kerri.” Mom put her hand on my arm. “Let her do her job.”
Ms. Wang made the call while we were still in the lobby. I could see her through the glass, the phone against her shoulder, writing on a pad.
I got Mom out to the truck. I had the door open and one hand on her elbow when my phone went off in my back pocket.
It was Adrienne.
“You took her to my bank?” she said. “Put her on the phone. Right now, Kerri.”
The lockbox on the front door
Monday morning there was a sign in our front yard.
A real estate company’s sign on a white post, pounded into the strip of lawn by the mailbox. The kind with a little box of flyers hanging off it.
A man in a quarter-zip pullover was on our front step, screwing a gray lockbox onto the doorknob.
I came out in my socks.
“That’s my mother’s house,” I said.
“Yes ma’am. I’m the listing agent.” He handed me a flyer from the box like I’d asked for one. “We’re live on the MLS at noon.”
The flyer had a photo of our house from the street, taken in the summer. Our roses. My truck in the driveway, cropped half out. Under the photo, in blue, it said $465,000.
The same number Adrienne said in the hallway. She hadn’t guessed at it.
“Who signed the listing?”
He had a folder ready. He was used to this.
The listing agreement had our address at the top. At the bottom it was signed Adrienne Kostas, attorney-in-fact for Sherry Pedersen. Dated three days after the hearing.
“There’s a court hearing on this house in eleven days,” I said. “The judge threw out her order.”
“I can only go by the power of attorney, ma’am. If a judge says something different, somebody sends me the order and I pull the listing. That’s how it works.”
“There’s no order yet. There’s a hearing.”
“Then there’s a listing,” he said. He wasn’t being mean about it. That was worse.
I called the courthouse from the step. The clerk was nice and said nothing could happen before the hearing unless a lawyer filed an emergency motion. I asked how much a lawyer would cost to do that. She said she couldn’t give legal advice.
Then my boss called from the yard. A jackknifed semi on I-90 out by Vantage, two trucks needed, could I go out tonight.
It was my night. It’s thirteen hundred a month, those nights.
“I can’t tonight,” I said.
“You’ve never said that.”
“I know,” I said. “I can’t.”
Across the street Mrs. Pfeiffer came out on her porch in a quilted robe with a coffee mug. She looked at the sign. Then she came down her steps and crossed the street in her slippers, which Mom would have yelled at her for.
“Kerri,” she said. “Is this about the white car?”
“You saw it?”
“Honey, she parked in front of my house four times. She waved at me. Every time. I figured you knew she was coming. I figured it was a family thing and you were at work.”
“I was at work.”
She looked at the lockbox. Then she looked at me.
“I keep a calendar on my fridge with when the garbage goes out,” she said. “I wrote it on there because I thought it was nice. That she was finally coming to see her mother.”
“Would you say that to a judge?”
“I’ll say it to anybody you want,” she said. “I’ll even wear a skirt.”
The listing agent drove off at ten. Mom stood at the living room window with the curtain in her good hand and watched him go.
That night I didn’t go out on the tow. I left the porch light off and sat at the kitchen table with my coffee, and Mom sat across from me, doing a crossword in pen.
At nine-forty, headlights came down our street and stopped across from the Pfeiffers’.
Then we heard a key in the back door.
Nine-forty at night
Adrienne came in through the laundry room in her coat and saw me at the table and stopped.
“You’re supposed to be on a call,” she said.
“I’m not.”
She had a manila envelope and a pen from her bank. She looked at Mom, not me.
“Mom, I drove four hours. I need ten minutes with you.”
“You drove four hours a lot this spring,” Mom said.
Adrienne sat down in Dad’s chair at the end of the table. She took a single typed page out of the envelope and laid it in front of Mom. Then the pen on top of it.
I read it sideways. I, Sherry Pedersen, state that on April 22 I was confused and upset, and the note I gave the court does not reflect my true wishes. I trust my daughter Adrienne Kostas to manage my affairs. A line at the bottom for a signature.
“My lawyer wrote that,” Adrienne said. “It just says you were upset. Which you were. Everybody saw it. You sign that, we go back in front of the judge, and this is all over in five minutes. Nobody has to ask you what year it is. Nobody has to read your little notebooks out loud.”
Mom studied the typed page. Then the pen.
Then she picked the pen up with her right hand.
She tried to close her fingers on it. The thumb came across. The two middle fingers wouldn’t go. She held it for a few seconds like you’d hold a cigarette, and it rolled out and hit the table and went off the edge onto the floor.
Nobody picked it up.
Mom reached into her cardigan with her left hand and took out the pages from Ms. Wang’s office. She unfolded the first one and put it on the table between Adrienne and the typed statement.
The copy of the signature page from the credit union.
Sherry Pedersen. Upright. The S had a loop on it the size of a nickel. The P stood up straight.
Then she unfolded the second one. Her signature card from the fall after she broke her wrist. Small letters, leaning hard to the right, like they were walking into the wind.
She set the two side by side and squared them up with the edge of the table.
“I haven’t made that S since the fall,” Mom said. “You held my old check up to the light at Thanksgiving and told me so.”
Adrienne looked at the pages. She didn’t touch them.
“You signed it, Mom. You just don’t remember signing it. That’s what happens. That’s literally why we’re…”
“I remember the pie,” Mom said.
I went to the hall closet. I didn’t need the flashlight this time. I brought back Dad’s folder and took the rubber band out of the back pocket, and the three checks that were left in it, and I put them next to the copy.
The same S. The same loop.
There used to be about a hundred of those checks.
“You took them to Vancouver,” I said. That was all I said.
Adrienne pushed her chair back. Just briefly I thought she’d leave. Instead she leaned forward on her elbows and talked to Mom like I wasn’t there.
“Do you know what a notary looks at? A driver’s license. A face. Nobody in this state is going to believe a woman who draws maps of cars over a notary’s stamp. That’s why the petition, Mom. That’s the only reason. If you’re confused, it doesn’t matter what you say about your own name.”
The kitchen clock ticked over to nine-fifty.
Mom bent down slowly, the way she has to now, with one hand on the table. She picked the bank’s pen up off the floor with her left hand.
Then she drew a single line through the typed statement, corner to corner.
“Get out of my kitchen, Adrienne,” she said.
Courtroom 4, May 6
I brought a cardboard box.
Twenty-three spiral notebooks from Bi-Mart, in order, with the one from Mom’s cardigan on top. The three old checks in a sandwich bag. The copy of the credit union signature page. The copy of the signature card. The freezer pages. The map. The bill, PAST DUE.
Mrs. Pfeiffer sat in the second row in a navy skirt with her fridge calendar in her purse. Ms. Wang sat on the end of the same row on her lunch break. I hadn’t asked her to come. Mom had.
Adrienne came in a gray suit this time, not the cream one. Same lawyer. He’d brought a lot more paper than last time, and he kept his eyes off me when he set it down.
His reading glasses were on. He didn’t peer over them at me.
“Ms. Pedersen,” he said. “I understand you’re not represented. Is there anything you’d like to put in front of the court?”
I stood up. I’d practiced this in the truck.
“One thing, Your Honor. Would you ask my mother to sign her name.”
Adrienne’s lawyer was up before I’d sat down. “Objection. This is a stunt. She’s had two weeks to rehearse…”
“Six years,” Mom said from her chair. “I’ve had six years to rehearse.”
At a nod from the bench, the clerk brought Mom a legal pad and a pen. She picked up the pen with her left hand and signed her name across the middle of the yellow page. Small letters. Leaning right, into the wind.
The bailiff carried the pad to the bench. His shoes were tied this time, double-knotted.
I handed the clerk the box.
The judge spent a long time on the copies. He put the bank page beside the legal pad. He put one of the old checks beside the bank page. He opened the first notebook and then the last one.
Adrienne couldn’t stay in her chair.
“Your Honor, she’s been faking that hand for six years. She can hold a coffee cup. She can hold her coffee cup just fine when she wants something. Ask Kerri how much rent she’s paid in six years. Zero. Ask her.”
“Ms. Kostas,” her lawyer said.
“No. I’m going to say this. I’m the one with a mortgage. I’m the one with two kids at Western Washington. I’m the one who calls. She lives in that house for free, and she leaves Mom alone in it two nights a week to go drag wrecks off the freeway, and I’m the one in front of a judge?”
“Ms. Kostas, sit down,” came from the bench.
She didn’t sit down. She turned all the way around to face Mom.
“You were giving it all to her anyway. I asked you at Thanksgiving, I sat right there at your table and asked you who gets the house, and you said ‘Kerri’s here.’ Like that was an answer. Like I’m not your daughter. Like I’m the one who left. I took my half early. That’s all I did. Half, Mom. I didn’t even take half.”
Her lawyer put his pen down. He didn’t pick it back up.
Nobody in the gallery laughed this time.
Mom looked at her for a long time. She didn’t say anything. She held two of my fingers under the table.
The judge took his glasses off.
“Ms. Pedersen. Kerri. Where were you on the night of February twenty-fifth, around nine o’clock?”
I knew why he asked. Adrienne’s lawyer knew too. He looked up.
“On a call, Your Honor. Out at Vantage. A car went into the guardrail on the bridge.” I swallowed. “I’m out two nights a week. She’s alone those nights. She has her phone and the neighbors.”
“Thank you,” he said.
His eyes left me quickly. He looked at the box.
“The petition is dismissed,” he said. “The power of attorney dated March fourth is suspended pending review, and the court will notify the listing agent today. I’m referring this file, and those exhibits, to the county prosecutor. Counsel, I suggest you speak with your client about what she says in this room from now on.”
“Your Honor,” her lawyer said, “I’ll be moving to withdraw.”
Adrienne made a sound like a laugh with no air in it.
She picked up her purse. She walked down the aisle past Mrs. Pfeiffer and past Ms. Wang and past me, and at the door she stopped and turned around.
“She’s all yours, Kerri,” she said. “Good luck paying for her.”
The mailbox at two o’clock
In June I went off nights for good.
My boss said fine, like I’d told him I was switching coffee. Thirteen hundred dollars a month, gone just like that. I sold the second fridge out of the garage and put a padlock on the chest freezer instead.
The sign came out of the yard the day after the hearing. The listing agent pulled it himself and left a hole in the lawn by the mailbox that I filled with dirt and grass seed.
The line on the house is still there. The credit union’s fraud people send a letter every couple of weeks that says under review in four different ways. The prosecutor’s office called once and asked if Mom could come in to give a statement. She wore her red cardigan.
Mom’s birthday was the fourteenth. The phone didn’t ring.
She made a lemon cake anyway and we ate it on the deck. Mrs. Pfeiffer came over and had two pieces.
This morning Mom got up before me. When I came into the kitchen she was at the counter with a brown paper bag, packing my lunch for the day shift with her left hand. Ham sandwich, an apple, a note folded in half on top. She’s been doing it since I went off nights.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I know,” she said. She folded the top of the bag over twice.
I didn’t read the note until lunch. It said the weather. Clear, 74. Deer ate the last roses.
At two o’clock I was home, and we walked down the driveway to the mailbox together. Her cane, my arm. There was a new envelope from the credit union in the box, on top of the water bill.
She looked at it. Then she handed it to me.
“You open this one,” she said. “Your hands work.”
At the curb she held out two fingers, the way she does at crosswalks.
There’s no crosswalk on our street. I took them anyway.
If this one got to you, call the person who still writes down the weather for you, before the mail comes.
Family loyalty gets tested in an uncle’s ultimatum and Wendy’s extravagant ballroom plans. For another money-fueled family showdown, read about a daughter-in-law confronted with $91,240.
