My uncle’s wife sold my grandmother’s hymn books for a quarter apiece at the church rummage sale, with Grandma still alive three miles away. “She won’t need them where she’s going,” she told the line, and booked a realtor for the $412,000 house. She’d forgotten what our pastor kept in his desk.
Grandma had her stroke the last week of August and has been in a care home ever since.
She’s eighty-eight. Her right hand won’t close anymore, but she still mouths every word when I play hymns for her on the little keyboard I bring on Thursdays.
Last Thursday she grabbed my wrist with her good hand and said one word.
“Pastor.”
I thought she wanted somebody to pray with her. I told her I’d ask him.
Then Saturday came.
I’d signed up to run coffee at the fall rummage sale in the fellowship hall, so I walked in at 7:15 with two cans of grounds and a sleeve of cups.
The third table from the door was Grandma’s.
Her quilts, folded in a stack. Her recipe tin with the dented lid. The brass candlesticks off her mantel, and the cushion off her organ bench, still pressed down where she sat for sixty years.
And the hymn books.
All nineteen of them, the ones with her pencil fingering in the margins, rubber-banded into one pile with a piece of masking tape on top that said 25¢ EACH.
My aunt Shawna sat behind the cash box in a purple fleece, making change for a lady from the choir.
Shawna is married to Uncle Leroy, Grandma’s only living son. My dad was the other one. He’s been gone nine years.
Her son Brady was carrying another box in from Leroy’s truck.
I picked up the top hymn book and it fell open by itself to the page Grandma played at my dad’s funeral.
“Shawna, what is this?”
“It’s a rummage sale, Kiera,” she said. “People bring things.”
“Those are Grandma’s.”
“Well, she won’t need them where she’s going.” She said it loud enough for the choir lady to hear, and she smiled while she said it.
“She’s going to the dining room at eleven-thirty,” I said. “She’s having the soup.”
Shawna didn’t look up from the cash box.
“Leroy has power of attorney,” she said. “Somebody has to get that house ready. Realtor’s coming Monday, and it’s four hundred and twelve thousand if we clear it out.”
“And the organ?”
“A man from the classifieds is picking it up at four. Nine hundred dollars. He’s parting it out.”
Nine hundred dollars.
Grandma paid more than that to get it tuned.
I looked at Uncle Leroy. He’d come in behind Brady and was standing by the coat rack holding a box of her Christmas ornaments, staring at the floor like it owed him money.
“Leroy.”
“It’s done, Kiera,” he said. “Shawna’s handling it.”
Shawna held her hand out, palm up.
“You want that book, it’s a QUARTER,” she said. “Same as everybody.”
I put a quarter in her hand.
Then I tucked the hymn book under my arm and went to make the coffee, because forty people were coming at eight and somebody had to.
The urn takes eleven minutes to heat. Its cord has a wrap of black electrical tape on it that’s older than I am.
I stood there and thought about March.
In March, before the stroke, Grandma had me drive her here on a Tuesday afternoon with a shoebox on her lap.
She went into the pastor’s office for fifty minutes and made me wait in the car.
When she came out the shoebox was empty, and all she said was, “Well. That’s on the record now.”
I figured she meant the church minutes.
Pastor Andres came in the kitchen door at a quarter to eight carrying three pies from his wife.
He saw the table. He saw Grandma’s quilts.
He set the pies down very slowly.
“Kiera,” he said. “How long has that been out there?”
“Since seven. Grandma said your name to me on Thursday. Just your name.”
He took his glasses off and pressed the heel of his hand into one eye.
“She told me somebody would come ask,” he said. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be you.”
He went down the hall to his office. I heard the bottom drawer of his desk, the one that sticks.
When he came back he had the old gray tape recorder they use to send sermons out to the shut-ins, and one cassette in a clear plastic case.
There was masking tape on the cassette. Grandma’s handwriting. Her name, and under it one word in capitals.
ALOUD.
Shawna saw it from the register.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“Philomena asked me to keep this,” Pastor Andres said. “She asked me to play it in front of the family. I’d say the family’s here.”
“TURN THAT THING OFF, ANDRES,” Shawna said.
He hadn’t turned it on yet.
Leroy set the box of ornaments down on the floor.
Brady stopped in the doorway with his arms full.
The choir lady was still holding her change.
Pastor Andres put the recorder on Grandma’s table, right between the quilts and the hymn books with the twenty-five-cent tape, and pushed the cassette in.
He pressed PLAY.
A hiss. A chair creaking. Then Grandma’s voice, her old voice, the one from before August, clear as a Sunday morning in Fergus Falls.
“My name is Philomena Fjelstad. It’s the eleventh of March, Andres is sitting right here, and I want this read out loud while I’m still alive to hear it.”
Shawna’s hand went flat on the cash box.
The eleventh of March
“In February Shawna put a paper in front of me at my own kitchen table and said it was for the furnace man,” the tape said. “I didn’t have my glasses on. I signed it.”
The choir lady put her change in her coat pocket slowly, like it might go off.
“Then I went to the bank to take out money for Kiera’s birthday, and the girl at the window showed me where thirty-one thousand dollars went. It went to an account with Shawna’s name on it. Leroy, I want you to hear that from me. I’m alive. I don’t want my house sold out from under me while I’m alive, and I don’t want my things sold at all.”
Shawna stood up so fast her folding chair went over backward. She reached across the quilts and pushed STOP.
The machine clicked. Then there was nothing but the urn, starting to tick in the kitchen.
“That is a sick old woman,” Shawna said. “That is a sick old woman on a tape.”
“She made it in March,” Pastor Andres said. “She wasn’t sick in March.”
I didn’t look at Shawna. I looked at Leroy, because Grandma had said it to Leroy.
He was still by the coat rack. The ornament box was on the floor by his boots, and his face had gone the color of the cinderblock.
“Thirty-one thousand?” he said.
The front-room organ
Grandma’s organ sat in the front room of that house for sixty years, a Hammond spinet against the wall with the furnace vent, which is why it went out of tune so often.
She started me on it when I was seven. She’d sit on the left end of the bench and I’d sit on the right, and she’d take a pencil from behind her ear and write the fingering over the notes in tiny numbers. One for the thumb. Five for the pinky.
She wrote everything in pencil. Grocery lists. Birthday cards. Her checkbook.
She balanced that checkbook every Sunday night on the closed lid of the organ bench, because the kitchen table wobbled. Pencil, to the penny. If she was off a dime, she found the dime before bed.
Thirty-one thousand dollars doesn’t go missing from a woman like that. Not while she has the book.
Shawna took the book last fall. That’s how Shawna put it at Thanksgiving, passing the rolls: “I’ve taken the bills off Mom’s plate.” Grandma had cataracts in both eyes by then and held the Fergus Falls paper at arm’s length. Shawna drove her to the eye doctor, the clinic, the bank. Everybody at church said what a help Shawna was.
I said it too. I said it to Shawna’s face, at Easter.
My dad had been the son who fixed things. Leroy was the son who mowed. When Grandpa died there was a second mortgage on the house that nobody knew about, and in 2011 my dad drove up from St. Cloud every weekend that spring to sit at Grandma’s kitchen table with a stack of papers. I was nineteen and mostly there for the bars she made.
I remember him saying, “It’s handled, Ma. Stop crying. It’s handled.”
I never asked what.
After he died, the county kept mailing a property tax statement to the house every spring with his name on it, under hers. Grandma kept those envelopes in the organ bench, under the checkbook.
“County still writes to him,” she said the first year. “Let them.”
She called it my dad’s letter. She never opened one in front of me.
The last time I sat on that bench with her was in July. She played the left hand and I played the right, the way we did when I was seven, and she missed a note and laughed at herself, and she said, “You’ll play for me when I can’t.”
In the fellowship hall the clock over the kitchen pass-through said 7:58.
Leroy picked up the ornaments and walked out the side door to his truck.
February fourteenth
The doors opened at eight. Forty people came in with their coats on and their cash out, and nobody had told them anything.
Shawna set her chair back up. She opened her purse and took out a plastic sleeve with a paper in it and laid it on the cash box where I could read it.
DURABLE POWER OF ATTORNEY. Grandma’s name. Leroy’s name. A notary stamp from the bank. February 14.
Grandma’s signature ran off the end of the line, the way it does when she doesn’t have her glasses on.
“That’s a paper,” Shawna said. “That’s what a paper looks like. You can play your little tape at the courthouse and see what they say. She gave me that money, Kiera. For our roof. Because Leroy’s her son and she wanted to, and then she forgot. She forgets. That’s why she’s where she is.”
“She’s where she is because of a stroke,” I said.
“Andres, you’re a pastor, not a lawyer.” Shawna made change for a man buying the candlesticks without looking at him. “You want to tell me a tape beats a notary?”
“No,” he said. “She told me that herself. I notarize the shut-ins’ absentee ballots every fall, Shawna, I know what a stamp is. She said this tape was never for a judge. She said it was for Leroy.”
The choir lady was Graciela, who sits two rows behind the organ and sings a third too high. She set two of Grandma’s quilts on the table and counted out four dollars.
“Well, I already picked these,” she said. “And Shawna’s done everything for her. Somebody had to drive her.”
Shawna took the four dollars and said thank you.
“I’ll call the bank,” I said.
“Bank’s closed till Monday.” She didn’t even look up. “Realtor’s at the house Monday at nine. Actually, you’ll want to be there, Kiera. There’s a paper for you too. Just a formality, since your dad’s gone. You sign it and you’re done with all this.”
I went back to the kitchen because the urn was done and people were lining up with cups.
Pastor Andres came and stood next to me at the counter. He had the recorder in both hands, against his chest, like a casserole.
“She stopped it halfway,” he said. “There’s a side B. Philomena said that one’s only for you.”
The trailer from Wahpeton
At 3:40 I went to the bank machine on the way out of town and took out nine hundred dollars. That was most of what I had in checking.
Then I drove to Grandma’s.
Leroy’s truck wasn’t there. Brady was sitting alone on the front step with a blue Gatorade, and he stood up when he saw my car, like I was somebody he worked for.
The front room was bare except for the organ. Brady had pulled it a foot off the wall. The bench stood next to it with the lid up.
Empty. No checkbook. No envelopes. Only the felt lining and a pencil stub.
“Where’s her checkbook?” I said. “It was in here. Her letters were in here.”
Brady looked at the bench, then at his shoes.
“Mom cleaned the bench out Wednesday,” he said. “I don’t know where any of it went.”
The man from the classifieds pulled up at four with a utility trailer. His name was Dong, from over by Wahpeton, in a seed cap, very polite. He fixes old organs and sells the parts online, the reeds and the tone wheels and the keys.
I held out the envelope with the nine hundred in it.
“I’ll pay what you’re paying,” I said. “She was my grandmother. Please.”
He looked at Brady. Brady got his phone out and called his mom, and she picked up on the first ring, on speaker.
“Not to her,” Shawna said. “It’s sold. Brady, help the man.”
She hung up.
Dong took his cap off and put it back on.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” he said. “I made the deal with that lady weeks ago. I’m not trying to cheat anybody.” He turned his phone around so I could see. “Here. It’s all right here.”
The messages went back a long way. The first one was from Shawna.
Hammond spinet, mother’s estate, available after Labor Day. Must go fast.
Above it, in gray, the date.
August twelfth. Grandma didn’t have her stroke for two more weeks.
Side B
The organ went out the front door at 4:25 on a furniture dolly, the bench strapped on top of it. I didn’t help, and I didn’t leave either.
Sunday I played the 9:30 service like always.
Leroy and Shawna’s pew was empty. I played the funeral hymn for the postlude, out of the book I’d paid a quarter for, with Grandma’s pencil numbers over every chord. Nobody but Pastor Andres knew why.
Afterward he shut his office door and sat me in the chair across from his desk. It’s a brown vinyl chair that sighs when you sit in it. He pulled the bottom drawer, and it stuck, and he pulled it again.
He took out the shoebox from March.
Inside were seven long envelopes from the county, rubber-banded. My dad’s name in the window of every one, under hers.
He put the cassette in the recorder, side B up, and pressed PLAY.
Hiss. The chair creaking. Then Grandma, softer than before.
“Kiera. It’s just us now, honey. Andres is here, but he’s being good.”
Pastor Andres looked at his hands.
“Your daddy paid this house off in 2011, when the bank was going to take it. Every dime. He wouldn’t let me pay him back, so I had Lambert put his name on the deed with mine. Half. Your half now, since he’s gone. Leroy doesn’t know. Your daddy didn’t want Leroy to feel small.”
A pause. A cough. Paper moving.
“Shawna knows. She opens my mail now. Those county letters are in this box, so she can’t have them.”
I put my hand on the envelopes.
“That half was never mine to sell. And it isn’t Leroy’s. If she brings you a paper, you don’t sign it.”
The tape hissed for a long time. I thought it was over. Pastor Andres reached for the button, and her voice came back, close to the microphone, like she’d leaned in.
“Don’t you sign anything that woman brings you, Kiera. You hear me?”
Nine o’clock Monday
The recorder’s office at the Otter Tail County courthouse opens at eight. I was the first one at the window. The woman there found it in about four minutes, a quitclaim deed from 2011, and printed me a certified copy for a few dollars.
Philomena Fjelstad, to Philomena Fjelstad and my father, as tenants in common. Drawn up by Lambert, the lawyer on Union Avenue. My father’s signature at the bottom, the same square printing as on my birthday cards.
I got to the house at 8:55.
The realtor was already in the kitchen. Whitney, from the office by the Cenex, with a leather folder and a lanyard. Shawna was at the table in the purple fleece. Leroy stood at the counter with a coffee he wasn’t drinking. Brady was in the doorway to the front room, where the organ used to be.
“Good, you’re here,” Shawna said. “Whitney, this is Kiera, the one I told you about. It’s a two-minute thing, honey. Sit down.”
I put the certified copy on the table next to Whitney’s folder.
Whitney read it. She opened her folder and took out a paper that already had my name typed on it, with a yellow sticky flag where it said SIGN HERE.
A quitclaim deed. Kiera Fjelstad, to Leroy Fjelstad.
Whitney looked at Shawna.
“Shawna, you told me the niece already agreed to sign off,” Whitney said. “You said it was settled in the family.”
“It IS settled,” Shawna said. “It’s a formality. Her dad’s been dead nine years, Whitney. Nobody’s paid one dime of taxes on that house but us since last fall. Nobody’s driven that woman to one appointment but me. Do you know what that place costs? Nine thousand a month. Nine thousand. I had the brochure since June, because she couldn’t do the stairs anymore, and somebody had to plan for it, and it wasn’t going to be her.”
Leroy put his coffee down.
“You said the county letters were junk mail,” he said. “You said that, Shawna.”
“Oh, don’t. Don’t you start. Your brother got to be the hero for writing one check. You mowed this lawn for thirty years and you got nothing, and you’re the one who’s still HERE.” She pointed at me. “And her, she’d have signed it. She signs the coffee sheet for every funeral lunch without reading a word. She’d have signed it on the hood of the car.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’m not signing it,” I said.
Whitney closed her folder. “I can’t list a house when one of the owners won’t sign,” she said. “I’m sorry, Leroy.”
She let herself out. Leroy watched the door close behind her and didn’t turn around.
“Thirty-one thousand,” he said to the door. “And the bench.”
Brady said, “Mom. Where’s Grandma’s checkbook?”
Shawna picked up her purse and went out the back, and the screen door banged twice.
At two that afternoon I drove to the care home with a revocation form I’d printed at the library and Pastor Andres in my passenger seat with his stamp in his coat pocket.
Grandma read every line of it with her glasses on. Then she took the pen in her good hand.
She signed it left-handed. One shaky P, and a long line after it.
The quarter
Three weeks later, on a Thursday, I set the little keyboard on her tray table like always.
The bank froze the account with Shawna’s name on it. Leroy writes the care home’s checks now, from a new account with only Grandma’s name and his, and he mails me a copy of every statement. He doesn’t call. He hasn’t come to church since.
Graciela left the two quilts on the church kitchen counter in a grocery bag, with a note that said for Philomena.
The organ is gone. Somewhere outside Wahpeton it’s in pieces on a shelf, and some of its keys are probably in other people’s organs by now. I didn’t get the nine hundred dollars’ worth of anything. I put the money back in checking.
I brought the hymn book. I opened it on her tray and told her what it cost me.
“A quarter,” I said. “Shawna made me pay a quarter.”
Grandma looked at me for a while. Then she held out her good hand, palm up, flat.
I dug in my coat pocket and put a quarter in it.
She closed her fingers around it, slowly, and pointed at the keys.
“Play,” she said.
If somebody in your family still balances a checkbook in pencil, go sit at their table this week and ask them to show you how.
For more family tensions with consequences, read the story of a husband who called the sheriff after his wife helped her mother, then see what happens when a shop’s rent keeps landing in the wrong account and a Christmas check sparks a showdown.
