My daughter-in-law drove off and left me at my husband’s grave, 212 miles from my house, then texted, “You’re dead weight, Lorene. Find your own way back.” My son added two words. I was eighty-two, so I dialed one number, and on Thursday Norman walked into his board vote and found me at the head of the table.
The text came while I was still on my knees by Eugene’s stone, pulling crabgrass out of the C in Culhane.
It popped up right under the picture of the headstone Sunita had taken that morning for her Facebook.
“You’re dead weight, Lorene. Find your own way back.”
Then Norman.
“Sorry, Mom.”
I got up too fast and had to hold on to the granite.
Their silver Mercury was already past the water tower.
Down by the chapel a man in a hunting cap was blowing leaves off the walk, and he never once looked over.
It would have been Eugene’s eighty-fifth birthday.
I quit driving after dark when my left eye went, so I’d asked them to take me to Sterling, where he was born and where he wanted to go back in the ground.
Sunita said yes on one condition.
“Forty minutes at the grave, then we eat on the road and we’re home before the news.”
I packed his thermos, his folding lawn chair and a paper sack of tulip bulbs.
I’d gotten eleven of them in when she came across the grass in her camel coat.
“That’s FORTY MINUTES, Lorene.”
“I’m not done.”
Norman stayed by the car with one hand on the roof.
“Mom, come on. The car’s running.”
“Give me a little longer. It’s his birthday.”
Sunita looked at her phone, then at me, then at the sack.
“He doesn’t know what day it is.”
I pushed the twelfth bulb in with my thumb.
When I looked up again, the car was gone.
I wasn’t scared, standing there with dirt on both knees and a thermos and no ride.
I was tired of them.
Back in August, Sunita had come over with a blue folder and a pen she’d already clicked.
A power of attorney, and a deed putting my house in Norman’s name “so it doesn’t get stuck in probate.”
“It’s one signature,” she said. “You’re eighty-two. You go down those basement stairs, guess who’s cleaning it up.”
Norman ate my coffee cake and looked at the clock on the stove.
I said no.
I SAID NO, and by Labor Day the neighbors were asking me if I was eating.
Sunita had told the woman across the street I was “slipping.” She told Norman I’d left a burner on overnight.
I hadn’t. NOT ONCE.
What neither of them knew about was the bread box.
That’s where I kept the envelopes from Navarro.
In 1983 Eugene wrote a check for $31,000 to his best friend from the elevator, who wanted to open a farm-supply store in a town with one stoplight.
It was EVERY DIME we had.
Eugene took forty percent and made Navarro swear he’d never tell a soul, not even our boy.
There are NINETEEN of those stores now.
Norman has run their warehouses for eleven years. He thinks Navarro hired him off his résumé.
On Thursday the board was voting him president.
Sunita had already bought the dress for the dinner after.
Every quarter since the funeral, Navarro mailed me a statement and a note in his awful handwriting asking me to take Eugene’s seat.
Every quarter I put it in the bread box under the rye.
I wiped my hands on my slacks.
I left both texts alone.
I scrolled down to the N’s and pressed his name.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Lorene? Is it Eugene’s birthday? Lord, I forgot.”
“You didn’t forget. You’re the only one who called this morning.”
“Where are you?”
“Standing on him. Norman and his wife drove off without me.”
I could hear his TV for a while. Wheel of Fortune.
“Drove off how?”
“Drove off. She texted that I’m DEAD WEIGHT.”
“She put that in writing. That goddamn woman.”
“I need two things from you. A ride home, and that chair you keep mailing me about.”
“Lorene. Thursday’s Norman’s vote.”
“I know what Thursday is. Who runs that meeting?”
“I do. Till I don’t.”
“Then I want your chair. EUGENE’S FORTY PERCENT VOTES THURSDAY, and it votes sitting at the head of that table.”
“You know what that does to him if you walk in there.”
“I know what he did to me out here.”
He laughed once, the way he used to laugh at Eugene over pinochle.
“Upton’s an hour and a half from you. Stay by the stone.”
“Where would I go?”
I poured the last of the coffee into the thermos cup.
Then I sat down in Eugene’s lawn chair and put the rest of the bulbs in. Thirty-one.
At 5:40 a gray pickup pulled in by the water tower, and a young man in a tie got out holding a folder of his own.
That night Sunita posted her headstone picture. “Happy birthday in heaven, Dad. Family is everything.”
Norman texted at 9:12.
“You make it home ok?”
I left it on read.
Thursday morning he put on the tie Eugene gave him for his fiftieth and drove to the main office to be made president.
He had no idea whose name was on the place card at the head of the table.
Room 2, 8:58
The card said CULHANE.
No first name. Navarro’s secretary had done it in black marker on a folded index card, the same hand as the price signs in the seed aisle, and set it at the head of my son’s table.
I sat behind it.
Upton had picked me up at seven and brought me in through the loading dock, so nobody at the front desk saw me. Navarro met us in the hall in a sweater vest. He kept touching his hearing aid.
“You sure, Lorene?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
There was a stuffed pheasant over the coffee machine with one glass eye gone.
The board came in one at a time, six men and one woman in good jackets. Each of them saw me and found something to do with a pen.
At 8:58 Norman came in, in Eugene’s tie.
He read the card before he saw anything else, and his shoulders went back. He got three steps down the side of the table with his hand out for the back of the chair.
Then he saw who was in it.
I turned the card an inch so it faced him square.
He looked at the card, then at my purse on the table, then at me.
“Mom,” he said. “You never even opened them.”
The red lid
Eugene built that kitchen in 1971 and put a tin bread box on the counter by the stove, cream with a red lid that rolls up, because his mother kept one in the same spot.
It held a loaf of rye, whatever I’d baked that week, and after the funeral, Navarro’s envelopes.
Eugene gave me his reason for the secret one time, at that counter, the night he wrote the check.
“If the boy knows there’s money behind him, he’ll quit trying.”
Norman was nineteen and had just walked off his second job.
To be fair to him, he never quit again. He drove a forklift, then ran a shift, then a warehouse, then all of them. Eugene went to every one of those company picnics and clapped from the back like he’d only come for the bratwurst.
So in August, when Sunita set the blue folder down next to my coffee cake, Norman got up without asking and went to the bread box for a second piece.
He was over there a while, so long that I called over and asked if he’d found it.
“You keep the good stuff in here,” he said, and came back with a slice on a napkin.
He’s been taking cake out of that box since he could reach the lid. I didn’t look twice.
Sunita tapped the folder with her pen. I read the first page, the power of attorney, and the top of the second, the house. I never turned to the third. I said no, and I kept saying it until she ran out of ways to ask.
She left the folder anyway.
“For when you come around.”
I put it on top of the refrigerator next to the flashlight. That’s where things go in my house when I don’t want them and can’t throw them out.
In Room 2, Navarro sat down on my left and folded his hands on the table.
Norman stayed standing.
The blue folder was in my purse, six inches from his hand.
Monday, 7:30
Upton’s folder in the pickup Sunday had held one page. It said I accepted the seat. I signed it on my knee somewhere past the county line while he drove with the dome light on.
Monday I wanted to do the decent thing. I called Norman at seven-thirty, before work, so he’d hear about Thursday from his mother and not from an index card.
Sunita answered his phone.
“He’s in the shower. Did you get home all right? Mrs. Isaksen said a pickup dropped you off after dark.”
Mrs. Isaksen lives across the street and keeps her recliner pointed at the window.
“A friend of Eugene’s drove me.”
“What friend?”
“I’d like to talk to Norman. Before Thursday.”
“Thursday isn’t about you, Lorene. Can he have one thing? One day?”
“He texted me sorry from the highway.”
“Because he was. We waited past the forty minutes. He was sick about it the whole way home.”
“Then put him on.”
“I’ll tell him you called.”
He didn’t call back. My phone sat on the counter next to the bread box all morning and didn’t ring until noon, and then it was Navarro.
“Board’s close on him,” he said. “Real close. Your forty decides it, one way or the other.”
“I know that.”
“Here’s what you don’t know. If somebody files papers saying you’re not fit, the bank’s lawyers tell me to sit you out till a judge says different. That’s not me, Lorene. That’s the loan on the stores.”
“Who’d file papers on me?”
He was quiet long enough for me to hear the noon news on his end.
“Upton’ll get you at seven Thursday. Don’t talk to anybody.”
Tuesday morning Mrs. Isaksen knocked on my back door holding a pie plate and a sheet of notebook paper.
Notebook paper
The pie was rhubarb, out of her freezer. The paper was folded in four and soft from being opened.
She sat at my table and didn’t take her coat off.
“Back in September your daughter-in-law brought me lemon bars,” she said. “She asked would I write down any time you seemed off. For your doctor. She was worried.”
“What did you write?”
“Your porch light was on in the daytime twice. You went to the mailbox in your slippers in the rain.” She pushed the paper at me. “That’s all I had. That’s all anybody’s got on anybody.”
It was in her round handwriting, dated September 14. Behind it Sunita had stapled a typed copy with a line for a signature.
Mrs. Isaksen had signed it.
“I thought it was for a doctor, Lorene.”
“I know.”
“Sunday night she called me. She wanted me to add a line and sign it again by Wednesday.” She took her glasses off and put them back on. “Found alone at a cemetery in Sterling, two hundred miles from her own house, unable to get back on her own.”
I got up and put the kettle on, because my hands wanted something that wasn’t the paper.
“What did you tell her?”
“That I saw you get out of a gray truck with a young man in a tie who carried your lawn chair up the steps. That’s what I saw, so that’s what I’d sign.”
“How’d she take it?”
“She said it didn’t matter, she had enough. She said it goes in with Norman’s petition.”
“Petition for what?”
“Guardianship. Of you.” Mrs. Isaksen looked at the pie instead of me. “Your house. Your money. Your say. She told me like she was telling me chicken thighs were on sale.”
The kettle started. I let it go.
“When?”
“Thursday at eight, at the courthouse. She wants it stamped before his vote.”
The step stool
Wednesday after supper I got the step stool out of the pantry and took the blue folder down off the refrigerator.
I’d said no to it for three months without reading it. That seemed like a thing to fix.
Page one was the power of attorney. Page two was the deed to the house, with a yellow flag where I was supposed to sign. Page three was the notary’s page, blank.
Page four said SCHEDULE A, and under it a list of everything Norman would be in charge of.
The house, by its address. My checking at the bank downtown. Eugene’s pension. And the last line, typed out in full:
All shares, voting rights and distributions in Navarro Farm & Feed, Inc., including the forty percent (40%) interest held through the Estate of Eugene R. Culhane.
At the bottom it said Prepared August 11.
I read the last line twice. Then I put the folder down and went to the bread box.
I took out the rye. I took out the rubber band of envelopes, twelve of them, one for every quarter since we buried him. I had never opened a single one. I didn’t want to see a number on paper with his name next to it.
I turned them over one at a time on the counter.
The July one had been slit along the top with a knife and taped shut again. Scotch tape, the kind out of my junk drawer. Inside was the statement, folded wrong, and Navarro’s note.
Lorene, the board names a new president in November. Norman’s on the list. Eugene’s forty decides it. Please come sit. N.
I held the envelope up under the light over the stove.
There were crumbs of coffee cake stuck under the tape.
Room 2, 9:04
“One of them got opened,” I said.
I took the July envelope out of my purse and laid it on the table by his hand, tape side up.
He looked at it. He didn’t pick it up.
Navarro tapped his pen and said he’d like to call the meeting to order, and the door opened.
Sunita came in wearing the dress. Navy, with a little jacket. A young man with a camera came in behind her, and she was holding a manila envelope with a red courthouse stamp across the top.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt, Mr. Navarro, but before anybody votes on anything, you need to see this.” She put the envelope down in front of him. “Norman filed for guardianship of his mother at eight o’clock this morning. Filed and stamped.”
Navarro didn’t touch it.
“She was found alone at a cemetery two hundred miles from her house on Sunday,” Sunita said. “She leaves burners on. She goes out in the rain in her slippers. Ask her neighbor, it’s all in there, signed. She’s eighty-two years old. She doesn’t know what day it is.”
I took out my phone, opened the text and slid it down the table to Navarro.
You’re dead weight, Lorene. Find your own way back.
He read it and passed it to the woman on his right.
Then I laid down Mrs. Isaksen’s notebook paper, and on top of it the blue folder, open to page four. I put my finger on August 11.
Navarro read the date out loud.
“That’s a month before anybody wrote down a porch light,” Upton said from the corner.
Sunita went red down to her collar.
“I didn’t write that page,” she said. “I didn’t even know what Farm and Feed WAS. He came home with that envelope in his coat. He wrote it all out on a legal pad and I typed it. He’s the one who said forty minutes.”
“Sunita.”
“Don’t you Sunita me. You said if we left her she’d call a cab and cry, and Isaksen would be at the window when it pulled up. You sent the sorry, Norman. That was you.”
The young man lowered his camera and backed out into the hall.
Norman stood with his hand on the back of a chair that wasn’t his and said nothing. Eugene’s tie was crooked.
Navarro moved the courthouse envelope to the side without opening it.
“Filed isn’t granted,” he said. “The bank can call me about it Monday. I’ve got a seat signed by a woman who got herself home from Sterling with a single call. The chair recognizes Mrs. Culhane. The motion is Norman Culhane for president.”
He looked at me.
“Lorene. It’s your forty.”
The board sat with their hands flat on the table. Norman looked at me for the first time since he’d walked in.
“Mom.”
I put my hand on the July envelope.
“No,” I said. “He keeps the warehouses. He’s good at warehouses.”
“Motion fails,” Navarro said.
Sunita picked up her courthouse envelope and walked out with it.
Norman picked up the card, read it again, and set it back down in front of me.
Sterling, April
Upton drove me out in the gray pickup the second Saturday in April. He says it’s on the company. I suppose some of the company is me.
Twenty-six of the thirty-one came up. Red ones, mostly, and a yellow I don’t remember buying.
I got down on my knees and pulled the crabgrass out of the C in Culhane.
The petition was withdrawn the Tuesday after the vote, by Norman’s own lawyer. The board made a man from the Hays store president. Norman still runs the warehouses. Some Sundays he sends me a picture of his tomato starts, and I send back a thumbs-up, and that’s about where we are.
Sunita hasn’t posted about me since. The dress went back to the store with the tags on, Mrs. Isaksen says.
The bread box has rye in it. The envelopes I open at the kitchen table now, with a knife, the day they come.
Upton set up the lawn chair, poured coffee into the thermos cup and held it out.
“How long do you want, Mrs. Culhane?”
“Till I’m done,” I said.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody whose mother still keeps the important papers in the kitchen.
Family loyalties can turn complicated fast – read about the sister who wrote her own toast and the suitcase with a troubling surprise. For another story of family conflict and a shocking accusation, see what she claimed about the signature.
