For thirty-four months I sent my mother $600 for her heart pills, and every Sunday my stepfather pointed his fork down the table at me and said, “Some of us stayed, Bea. Some of us actually pay for her medicine.” Then her pharmacy called my phone instead of hers. So for his seventieth I wrapped a box in gold paper.
She was sixty-six, and her heart had already put her in the hospital once.
That was why the money started.
“Mija, the new pills are four hundred something a month without the good insurance,” she said on the phone that first winter. “Cornelius is doing what he can.”
So I did what I could.
Six hundred dollars into their joint account on the first of every month. I never missed one. I put off my own dentist twice to keep it that way.
And every Sunday I drove forty minutes out from Lodi to sit at his table and hear about it.
“Bea’s busy,” he’d tell his sister Nina, loud enough for the kitchen. “Bea’s got her own life. That’s fine. Somebody has to be here.”
Nina looked at her plate.
Her son Hassan looked at his phone.
My mother patted Neil’s wrist and asked me to pass the rice.
I let it go. I let it go for almost three years.
Then on a Tuesday in October a pharmacist named Ahmed called my cell.
I was still on the emergency form from her hospital stay. Nobody ever took me off.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “Your mother’s card keeps declining on her refill, and she hasn’t picked up since July. It’s a nine-dollar copay. I didn’t want her going without.”
I was standing in a grocery store parking lot with a bag of ice.
“Nine dollars,” I said.
“Nine. Her plan covers the rest. It always has.”
I paid it over the phone with my own card.
The ice was for a cooler I never used. It sat on the passenger seat and dripped onto the floor mat while I opened my banking app.
My mother gave me the login to that joint account years ago, when I set up her electric bill. She forgot. I didn’t.
It took me four minutes.
My $600 landed on the first of every month.
On the second of every month, $600 went back out.
Same amount. Same little note. “Transfer to savings.”
My mother has never had a savings account in her life.
The transfer page showed an account ending in 0918 and two initials.
C.O.
THIRTY-FOUR TRANSFERS.
Twenty thousand four hundred dollars.
The balance on the morning the pharmacy called was eleven dollars and forty cents.
That night I phoned her and asked, like it was nothing, how the pills were going.
“Oh, they’re back-ordered again,” she said. “Neil keeps checking for me.”
I said that was nice of him.
I didn’t trust my voice, and I didn’t trust her not to tell him.
His seventieth birthday dinner was that Sunday.
I printed all thirty-four statements at the library and went down every page with a yellow highlighter until my hand cramped.
I folded them into a shirt box.
I wrapped it in gold paper from my hall closet, leftover stuff with little anchors on it, and tied a bow that took me three tries.
Sunday his whole side came. Nina. Hassan and his wife Dina, and their daughter Ava, who’s nine and sat next to me drawing horses on her napkin. My uncle Gilberto came too, because my mother asked him.
Neil stood up before the cake with a can of beer.
“Seventy years,” he said. “And I’ve learned one thing. You find out who your family is by who shows up when it costs them something.”
He looked straight at me on “costs.”
“To the ones who stayed.”
Everybody drank. My mother smiled up at him and squeezed his arm.
I set the gold box beside his plate.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Well, look at that.” He laughed and looked around for somebody to laugh with him. “She finally bought me something.”
“Open it, Neil,” Gilberto said.
He pulled the bow loose and ripped the paper and lifted the lid, still grinning.
Then he saw the yellow.
The grin stayed. Nothing else on him moved.
“What is it?” Nina said.
He put the lid back on.
“A joke,” he said. “Bea’s idea of a joke. Juanita, go get the cake.”
My mother didn’t get up.
“Mom,” I said. “Ask him whose ACCOUNT ENDS IN 0918.”
The table went quiet a piece at a time. Hassan put his phone face down. Dina reached over and took the crayon out of Ava’s hand.
“I don’t know what that means,” my mother said.
“It means every dollar I sent for your heart went OUT THE NEXT MORNING,” I said. “Thirty-four times. Your pills are NINE DOLLARS A MONTH, Mom. You quit taking them in July because there was eleven dollars left.”
Neil stood up so fast his chair hit the wall.
“You want to do this at my birthday?” he said. “In front of my family?”
“You did it in front of your family every Sunday for three years,” I said.
My mother looked at him.
Then at the box.
He laid his hand flat on the lid.
She held hers out, palm up, and waited.
The box on her lap
She wanted the box.
Neil didn’t give it to her. He kept his hand where it was and said, “Juanita, it’s paper. It’s Bea being Bea.”
“Then it’s my paper,” my mother said. “That’s my account. You told me so.”
Her hand stayed out over the plates, palm up, the way she used to hold it out for my car keys when I was sixteen and late.
Gilberto pushed his chair back. He didn’t stand. He pushed it back far enough that everybody heard it on the linoleum.
Neil looked at him a while. Then he took his hand off the lid.
My mother pulled the box across the tablecloth into her lap. She took out the top page and held it at arm’s length, because her reading glasses were on the kitchen windowsill, where they always are.
“Ava,” Dina said. “Go get Juanita’s glasses off the window, baby.”
Ava went. She came back with them and stood by my mother’s chair, and Dina said her name again, and she went and sat down.
My mother put the glasses on. She read with her finger, the way she reads a recipe. First of the month, six hundred in. Second of the month, six hundred out. She turned the page over and looked at the back like there might be more on it.
Then she looked at Neil.
He didn’t sit down. He pointed at the far side of the table with his beer.
“Ask my sister,” he said. “Ask Nina who’s been here.”
The vending machine on the third floor
That first winter, when her heart put her in the hospital, I slept four nights in the chair by her bed.
A nurse brought me a clipboard the first night. I put my cell number on the line that said contact. I didn’t think about it again for almost three years.
Neil came the second day with a grocery bag of her nightgowns and the wrong slippers, the fuzzy ones she only wears in the bathroom.
That night I found him at the vending machine at the end of the hall. He was feeding it quarters one at a time and getting nothing.
“I’ll put her pharmacy on my card,” I said. “They can bill me direct. You won’t have to think about it.”
He turned around and put his hand on my shoulder. He had a mechanical pencil in his shirt pocket and a little spiral notebook where he wrote down his gas mileage. He was a man who looked like he handled things.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t you ever call that pharmacy, Bea. She’s proud. Your mother finds out her daughter’s paying her pharmacist, she’ll quit taking them out of spite. You know how she is.”
I did know how she was. That was the trouble.
“Put it in the account,” he said. “I’ll handle the pharmacy. That’s my job.”
So I put it in the account.
The Sunday line started the second month. “Some of us stayed.” By spring it had a second half. “Some of us actually pay for her medicine.” He’d say it to the room, but he always said it toward Nina.
After dinner he walked Nina out to her car every Sunday. She handed him something through the window, folded, and he put it in his back pocket. I figured it was gas money. He drove her to the eye doctor on Thursdays.
Once, last spring, she caught me in the driveway before I could get my door open.
“He’s doing everything for her, honey,” she said. “You could do a little more.”
“I do what I can,” I said.
“Mm,” Nina said, and got in her car.
Now she sat at the far end of the table with her napkin in both fists, and every face had turned to her.
Account ending in 0918
“He’s been here, Bea,” Nina said. “That’s all I know. He’s been here.”
“That’s right,” Neil said.
He took the top page out of my mother’s hand. She let him.
“You want to know about 0918?” He held the page up for the table. “That’s savings. Our savings. I’m her husband. You know what a place costs? Assisted living? Eight thousand a month. I went and looked. Somebody has to plan for when her heart quits the rest of the way, because God knows who else is going to take her in.”
He looked at me on “who.”
“So I put it away. For her. And this one goes behind my back to the library and makes a craft project out of it.”
Hassan cleared his throat.
“Bea, come on,” he said. “It’s his birthday. Whatever this is, it’s between them.”
“It’s her pills,” I said.
“Her pills are back-ordered,” Neil said. “Ask her.”
I got my phone out. I opened the app and found the transfer page and held it out across the table to my mother so she could see the 0918 and the C.O.
“Then show her,” I said to him. “Open yours. Show her the savings.”
“I’m not opening a thing for you.”
My mother didn’t take my phone. She looked at it in my hand, and then she looked at my face, and her mouth went small.
“How are you in my account?” she said.
“You gave me the login. For the electric.”
“That was for the electric bill, Beatriz.”
Nobody calls me Beatriz. Not since my grandmother.
Neil set the page down on his plate, in the gravy, and didn’t seem to care.
“There you go,” he said to the table. “There’s your daughter who visits.”
My mother took her glasses off.
“You went through my bank like a stranger,” she said.
The envelope through the car window
Nina had been working her napkin into a rope. She put it down.
“You don’t get to stand there like that, Bea,” she said. “Not after March.”
“What happened in March?”
“You stopped.” She said it to the table, not to me. “He told me. He sat in my kitchen and cried about it. Said you’d quit sending, said the new pills were four hundred now, said Juanita didn’t know and couldn’t ever know because she’s proud.”
Hassan turned all the way around in his chair.
“Mom,” he said. “What did you do?”
“Three hundred a month,” Nina said. “Cash. Since March. It’s my money, Hassan. I can do what I want with my money.”
“Cash in an envelope,” I said. “Through the car window.”
Nina looked at me like I’d read her mail.
“I never stopped,” I said. “Not one month. Not in March. Not ever.”
“Bea,” Neil said.
I reached into the box on my mother’s lap. She didn’t stop me. I found March because March was the page where the highlighter started to run out and the yellow went thin. I walked it down the table to Nina and put it on top of her plate.
March 1. Deposit. $600.00. B. MEJIA.
March 2. Transfer to savings. $600.00.
Nina put her finger on the first line and held it there.
Dina got up and took Ava by the hand and walked her into the living room, and turned the TV on louder than it needed to be.
“That’s eight months,” Hassan said. “Mom. That’s twenty-four hundred dollars.”
“It all went to her,” Neil said. “Every dime went to Juanita.”
My mother said, “I haven’t had a pill since July.”
Nina picked her purse up off the floor.
Nina’s phone
She didn’t look at her brother. She got her phone out of the purse and put her reading glasses on, the drugstore kind, and scrolled with one finger for a long time.
“Nina,” Neil said. “Put that away.”
“March fourth,” Nina said. She read it flat, like a grocery list. “‘Bea’s done helping. Can you cover the pills this month. Don’t say nothing to Juanita, she’s proud.'”
She scrolled.
“July ninth. ‘Pharmacy went up. Need 400 now if you can. She don’t know I’m asking.'”
She scrolled again.
“August. ‘Same as last month. You’re the only one in this family who shows up.'”
Neil laughed, one short one, and looked for someone to laugh with him. Hassan was looking at his mother. Gilberto was looking at Neil.
My mother had her glasses folded in her hand. She was turning them over and over.
“She’s proud,” she said. “He told you I was proud.”
“He told me too,” I said. “At the hospital. By the vending machine. He said don’t you ever call that pharmacy, she’s proud, she’ll quit taking them out of spite.”
My mother looked at Neil.
“I’m not proud,” she said. “I’d have let her pay the nine dollars. I’d have let anybody.”
Nina took her glasses off.
“Every Sunday,” she said to him. “Some of us actually pay for her medicine. You said it so I’d hear it.”
“I said it because it’s true,” Neil said. “You did pay. Didn’t you?”
He said it like it was a point in his favor.
My mother set her reading glasses on the tablecloth. She stood up. It took her two tries, with a hand on the back of her chair, because she’d been off her pills since July and I could see it in how she stood.
She held her hand out to him again. Palm up.
“Your wallet, Cornelius,” she said.
Gilberto’s truck
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Neil said.
He didn’t reach for his wallet. He talked instead, and he talked to everybody.
“You want to know where it went? Look around. Who put the roof on this house? Who paid your cardiologist before your plan kicked in? The truck payment. Property tax. Eleven years I’ve carried this house and nobody at this table has once said thank you, and now I’m the crook?” He pointed his beer at Nina. “And you. You’d have put it in scratchers.”
“It’s in savings,” my mother said. “You told me. So you won’t mind.”
“I’m seventy years old. I’m not handing my wallet to anybody at my own birthday.”
Gilberto stood up then. He’s not a big man. He’s sixty-eight and he’s had two knees done. But he stood up, and he stayed standing, and he didn’t say anything.
Neil took the wallet out of his back pocket and threw it on the table. It slid into the butter dish.
My mother opened it. She went through it slow, the way she goes through her coupons. Her own pharmacy card, the one that kept declining. A credit union debit card I’d never seen, in his name. She turned it over and read the numbers on the back to herself.
She didn’t say them out loud. She didn’t need to.
“I was going to put it back,” Neil said. “All of it. I’ve got a thing coming.”
Nobody asked what thing.
“Bea,” my mother said. “Your phone.”
I gave it to her. She handed it back.
“You do it,” she said. “I can’t see the little buttons.”
I opened the joint account. There was a scheduled transfer at the top of the page. Six hundred dollars, November 2, to the account ending in 0918. Set up to repeat. I pressed cancel. It asked if I was sure. I pressed it again. Then I went into the settings and took the 0918 account off as a linked account, and it asked me for a code it sent to my mother’s phone, and she read it to me from her own phone with her arm all the way out.
Then I went to change the password. My mother took the phone back.
She turned her back to the table to type it. She turned her back to me too.
Neil stood through the whole thing with his hands on his hips.
“Who do you think’s going to drive you to the cardiologist?” he said to her. “Her? She comes forty minutes once a week to eat. You go off with her, you’ll be back here in a month. You’ve got nowhere else. You know that. That’s why you married me.”
My mother handed me my phone.
“You knew Tuesday,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you let me sit here and squeeze his arm. In front of all of them.”
“I thought you’d tell him.”
She thought about that. She didn’t say I was wrong.
“Gilberto,” she said. “Take me to your house.”
“Truck’s open,” Gilberto said.
She went to the bedroom and came out with her purse and the overnight bag she keeps packed in the closet since the hospital. She stopped at the kitchen windowsill for her pill bottle, the empty one, and put it in the purse.
Hassan had his arm around Nina. Nina was crying without making any noise and looking at the March page.
Nobody had cut the cake. Neil sat down in front of it.
Gilberto held the truck door, and my mother climbed in without looking back at either of us.
The first of November
The first of November was a Sunday.
I didn’t send anything. My mother told me on the phone Monday night to keep it. “Go get your teeth looked at,” she said. That was most of what she said to me that week.
She opened an account at the credit union with Gilberto standing next to her. Her name only. Ahmed has my card on file now, and my cell is the number on the front of her file instead of the back. Nine dollars. He called Wednesday to say she’d picked them up herself.
Nina mailed me a card with no note in it. Just her name.
I drove forty minutes out from Lodi to Gilberto’s. Not to Neil’s.
His kitchen table is smaller. There were five of us. My mother was at the end, and the new bottle was next to her plate, by the salt.
She didn’t pat anybody’s wrist. She shook one pill out and took it with her water before she’d touched her food, and she looked at me while she did it.
Then she picked up the rice and passed it down the table to me.
If this one got to you, call somebody you send money to this week, and ask them how the pills are going.
For more family drama and hard-to-believe betrayals, read the birthday show where one stranger’s bare toes stole the spotlight, the brother who made a half-million-dollar offer through a tow-truck window, and the night-desk worker whose husband put their house on the line for someone else.
