My son said my memory was going the month my pension letters stopped coming, and his wife laughed and said, “Teresa, you’d lose your own teeth if they weren’t glued in.” I believed them for seven months. Then my six-year-old granddaughter told me what her parents kept locked in the basement.
I had started writing the date on the back of my hand in ballpoint, so nobody could tell me what day it was.
Joel had already stuck a brochure for an assisted living place on my fridge, under Sylvester’s old union magnet.
“Just look at it, Mom,” he said. “Nobody’s making you do anything.”
Every Thursday I drive across Toledo to get Adeline from first grade and keep her until her parents are off work at six.
She talks the whole ride.
Who threw up at lunch.
Which boy licked the slide.
Why the class hamster sleeps in his food bowl.
That afternoon was the Halloween party, so she had cat ears on and one whisker drawn on her cheek in her teacher’s eyeliner. The other cheek had come off on her sleeve.
Halfway home, at a red light, she stopped talking.
Then she said, “Grandma, can I tell you something secret?”
I found her face in the rearview.
“Is it about the hamster?”
“No.” She pulled the belt strap off her neck. “Daddy said the police are NEVER allowed to hear it.”
I laughed. I actually laughed out loud.
“What did your father do, park in the handicapped spot again?”
She didn’t laugh back.
Her mouth was pressed flat, the way Joel’s used to go when he’d broken something and hidden the pieces.
“The basement,” she said. “Inside the gray tub with the clicky lid.”
“And what’s inside it, honey?”
“Mail.”
“Whose mail?”
She lifted one finger off her lap and pointed it at the back of my headrest.
“Yours.”
The light went green.
My pension letters had stopped coming in March.
Sylvester’s survivor statements, $1,412 every month for nine years, and then nothing.
When I asked in April, Joel said the post office in my zip code was a disaster.
When I asked again in May, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Mom. You throw them out. You do it with the water bill too.”
That was the night Nicolette made the joke about my teeth.
“Addie, how do you know it’s mine?”
“It has your name on it. Your REAL name.”
“And what’s my real name?”
“Teresa Rizzo,” she said, like I was the one in first grade.
She went on just as easy. “And your card with your face on it. The one you lost.”
My driver’s license.
I lost it in June. That’s what I’d been told, anyway.
I cried over it at the DMV, in a plastic chair, in front of everybody.
Joel drove me there. He held the folder with my birth certificate and told the woman at the counter, “She’s been having a hard year.”
I put my blinker on for no reason. I wasn’t turning.
“Did Mommy and Daddy say why it’s a secret?”
Adeline looked out her window at the car wash going by.
“Daddy said Grandma doesn’t find out till the house papers are done.”
“What house, baby?”
“Yours.” She kicked the back of my seat. “With the swing.”
Sylvester hung that porch swing the summer Joel was born.
And in August, at Joel’s kitchen island, I’d signed something.
A form for “the insurance,” he said, so the doctors could talk to him if I fell again.
I didn’t read it. I had the pen in one hand and Adeline’s juice box in the other.
“Addie. What else did Mommy say?”
She thought about it, kicking.
Then she did her mother’s voice, perfect, the way kids do.
“‘If your mother EVER opens that tub, Joel, WE LOSE THE WHOLE THING.'”
My foot came off the gas by itself.
At the next bank I cut through the lot and came back out the other way.
“Grandma, this isn’t the way.”
“I know.”
“Is Daddy going to know it was me?”
“Put that strap back on your shoulder.”
Joel’s house is fourteen minutes from the school. I did it in nine.
His truck was in the driveway.
At 3:40 on a Thursday. He’s at the warehouse till five-thirty every day of his life.
The little basement window by the side steps was lit.
I have a key to that house with a green rubber cap on it, so I’d “know which one.”
I unbuckled Adeline. Her cat ears had gone crooked.
We walked up the driveway holding hands.
From the side steps, you can see straight down through the window well.
The gray tub was sitting on top of the dryer with the lid off.
Next to it, somebody had laid MY envelopes out in rows, like solitaire.
A man’s voice came up through the glass. Not Joel’s.
“That’s all of them? Since March?”
“Every one,” Joel said.
The side door opened before my key touched it.
Nicolette stood there in her work lanyard, one hand flat on the frame.
She looked at my key. Then at Adeline.
“Teresa,” she said. “You’re early.”
“I’m not early. I’m HERE.”
Adeline let go of my hand.
Nicolette didn’t take her eyes off me. She said, not loud, “Joel. Your mother’s here.”
The voices downstairs stopped.
And in the window well, a hand reached across the dryer and put the lid back on the tub.
Preston
Nicolette didn’t move out of the door.
The hand on the lid had a gold watch on it, the loose kind that slides down to the knuckle. Two seconds later the same watch came up the basement stairs on a man I had never seen in my life.
He was around fifty, in a gray quarter-zip with WE BUY TOLEDO stitched on the chest, and he had a leather folder under his arm. He took the top step and smiled at me like I was the one he’d driven over to see.
“Mrs. Rizzo,” he said. He put his hand out. “Preston Kowalski. Are we still on for Monday?”
I didn’t take the hand. I put mine on the door, above Nicolette’s, and pushed it the rest of the way open, the way you push a cupboard that sticks in summer.
She let it go. Adeline was standing right there.
Joel came up behind the man with a stack of envelopes against his hip.
“Mom,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Picking up my granddaughter,” I said. “What’s Monday?”
Preston looked at Joel. Joel looked at the drain in the mudroom floor.
“Ten o’clock,” Preston said. “At the title office. Like we went over on the phone Tuesday.”
Twelve-fifteen
I have never been on the phone with a man named Preston.
What I’d been on, since March, was the porch swing at twelve-fifteen.
That’s when Joel started coming by. The warehouse changed his lunch, he said, and he could make it across town and back if he ate in the truck. He’d bring two soups from the Greek place on Dorr Street and sit on the swing with me.
Sylvester hung that swing in July of 1982, with Joel already kicking inside me, and he wrapped the chains in garden hose so nobody’s fingers got pinched. The hose is still on there. It’s gone the color of an old tooth.
Joel would finish his soup and walk down to the box at the curb.
“I got it, Ma,” he’d say, coming back up the walk with the mail under his arm. “Bills. Coupons. Nothing for you.”
I thanked him. Every single time, I thanked him.
He had a key to my house by then. He’d had it since January, when I go down to Sarasota to stay with Sylvester’s sister Ida, the second to the twenty-sixth, and somebody has to water the violets.
At Sunday dinner Nicolette did voices. She does everybody. Our priest, the weatherman on Channel 13, her own mother. She did me best. She’d fold her hands on the table and say, “Sylvester, the PORCH,” high and through her nose, and Joel would laugh till he had to get up from the table.
I laughed too. You laugh at your own impression, or you’re the woman who can’t take a joke.
There were two Teresa Rizzos on Fernwood Avenue when I married in, me and Sylvester’s mother, and the first thing he did was make me sign everything Teresa M. Rizzo. “So the bank knows which one of you is spending my money,” he said.
Forty-seven years, I’ve never once left out the M. Not on a check. Not on a birthday card.
I signed the August form with the M. I remember the M. I don’t remember another word on that page.
Now Preston Kowalski was standing at the top of my son’s basement stairs, holding his folder like my house was already inside it.
Joel put his free hand on Adeline’s head.
“Addie, go up to your room,” he said.
She went. Nicolette shut the basement door and leaned her back against it.
The chest freezer
“Mom, sit down,” Joel said. “Preston’s helping us with the insurance thing. From August. You remember August.”
“I remember a juice box.”
“See,” Nicolette said to Preston. Just that.
Preston set his folder on the chest freezer in the mudroom and turned it around so I could read. A copy of a power of attorney. Durable. My name typed at the top, Joel’s under it, a notary’s stamp. There had been a woman at the island that day eating a cookie. I’d thought she was somebody from Nicolette’s office.
And at the bottom, in my own hand, Teresa M. Rizzo.
“It covers the real estate, ma’am,” Preston said. “Your son signs for you at closing. It’s recorded with the county. It’s all clean.”
“Then I take it back,” I said. “Today. Whatever it is.”
Joel rubbed his face with both hands.
“Mom. You can’t take back something you don’t even remember signing. That’s the whole reason we did it.”
“I want my mail.”
He held out the stack from his hip. Sylvester’s statements, every one slit across the top with a knife.
“There. March to now. The money went in your checking the whole time. Nobody took a dime.”
I counted them. Seven.
There were more than seven envelopes on that dryer. Adeline said rows.
“And the rest?”
“That’s all of it,” Joel said.
“You put your license in the freezer once, Teresa,” Nicolette said. “Christmas. We found it with the peas.”
I have never put my license in a freezer. But I stood there in that mudroom and tried to see last Christmas, and for a second I couldn’t.
Preston closed his folder halfway.
“Mrs. Rizzo, I don’t want anybody upset. It’s a fair price, as it sits. And you told me yourself the swing could stay with the house.”
The dryer
I walked at Nicolette.
I didn’t push her. I just kept coming, the way you walk at a goose, and with Preston Kowalski watching she wasn’t going to put her hands on a seventy-one-year-old woman in a red coat. She stepped off the door.
“Teresa,” she said. “Don’t.”
The stairs are steep and Joel never put a rail on the left. I held the right one with both hands.
It smelled like dryer sheets and wet concrete down there. One of those blow-up snowmen was lying flat by the furnace with his face folded in half.
The tub sat on the dryer. Gray. Clicky lid.
I opened it.
The water bill. The gas bill. A birthday card from Ida with a Florida stamp. Four AARP magazines. All my name, all my address, all since March.
And under those, eleven envelopes from the same place. Lakeshore Home Lending, Columbus, Ohio. FINAL NOTICE stamped on three. One had red ink showing through the window.
Sylvester and I paid that house off in 2004. We burned the mortgage paper in the Weber and he toasted it with a Stroh’s.
I opened the red one.
Notice of Default. Home Equity Line of Credit. Borrower: Teresa Rizzo. Property: my house on Fernwood, typed right down to the zip. Credit line, $46,000. Amount drawn, $46,000. Payments missed: March, April, May, June, July, August, September.
March. The month my letters stopped.
My license was in the tub too, in a sandwich bag, with a yellow sticky note in Joel’s square printing. TITLE CO. COPY FRONT + BACK.
Upstairs the basement door opened, and Joel’s boots came down.
Somebody had borrowed forty-six thousand dollars against my house and spent every cent.
January fourteenth
“Mom, put that down,” Joel said from the bottom step.
“Who borrowed this?”
“You did.” He said it soft, the way you tell somebody their dog died. “For the roof. You don’t remember, and that’s okay. That’s what the papers are for.”
Nobody has touched my roof since Sylvester. It leaks over the back bedroom, and I put the spaghetti pot under it when it rains.
The red notice had a second page stapled to the back. Account summary. I held it up under the bulb.
Line opened: 01/14. Signed electronically, 2:11 p.m. Identity verified by phone, 01/13.
Under that, in the typed letters they use for a signature on a computer: Teresa Rizzo.
No M.
“January fourteenth,” I said.
“Mom.”
“I was at Ida’s. I was at Ida’s the second to the twenty-sixth. You had my key, Joel. You watered the violets.”
He didn’t say anything. His hand stayed on the rail.
“Somebody answered a phone as me on the thirteenth,” I said. “I was on a beach chair in Sarasota losing at rummy.”
“It’s more complicated than—”
“You started on my memory the month this came. The very same month.”
“That’s not how it went.”
“I signed August with an M. I’ve signed everything with an M since 1979. You’ve watched me do it your whole life.”
Joel sat down on the step. Just sat, with his boots on the step below, the way he sat on my back stoop the summer he put a baseball through the neighbors’ garage window and buried the glass under the hedge.
Behind him, Preston Kowalski had come halfway down. He was reading the paper in my hand over my son’s head.
“Joel,” he said. “Who did I talk to on Tuesday?”
Tuesday
Nicolette came down last. She still had the lanyard on. She stopped two steps above Preston, so she was the tallest one in the basement.
“You talked to her, Preston,” she said. “You talked to Teresa. She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember anything, that’s why there’s a power of attorney, that’s what we have been telling you.”
“Do me, Nicolette,” I said.
“What?”
“Do the porch.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She laughed, and it came out wrong. “You want to do this? Here? Fine. You want to know where the money went? Look at this ceiling. Look at that furnace. Joel got cut to thirty-two hours last November. Thirty-two. We were two payments from losing this house, and you’re sitting across town in four bedrooms with a swing nobody’s sat on in years—”
“I sit on it,” I said.
“—and the minute we needed anything, you’d have made it a whole thing. You make everything a whole thing. Sylvester this, Sylvester that, and every week it’s, ‘Oh, I just don’t know where my letters GO, Joel, I just don’t know—'”
She did it high and through the nose. Hands folded.
Preston stopped with one hand on the rail.
“That’s the voice,” he said. “That’s who I talked to.”
Behind the snowman, the furnace kicked on.
Preston shut his folder all the way and tucked it under his arm.
“I don’t buy a house with a forged loan on it,” he said. “I don’t care whose mother it is. Joel, I want my earnest money back by Friday, or my attorney calls you Monday instead of me.”
“Preston, hang on,” Joel said.
He was already going up. He didn’t hurry. He went up the way a man leaves a bad open house.
Nicolette turned on me.
“Who told you about the tub?”
“Your basement light was on,” I said. “You can see right down that window from the steps.”
“You never come to the side door.”
“I did today.”
I put it all back in the tub. The bills, the magazines, Ida’s card, Lakeshore, all eleven. My license in its sandwich bag on top. I pressed the lid down until it clicked on both ends.
“If you take that to the bank,” Joel said from the step, “it’s not just me, Mom. It’s her number they called. It’s her.”
“You walk out of here with that tub,” Nicolette said, “and you don’t get Thursdays. You don’t get Addie. I mean it, Teresa.”
I took my keys out of my coat pocket. The green rubber cap was easy to find. That’s what it was for.
I worked it off the ring and set it on the dryer where the tub had been.
Then I picked the tub up. Seven months of my mail. It was heavier than paper ought to be.
At the top of the stairs Adeline was sitting on the hall floor in her cat ears, one whisker left.
“Fix your ears, honey,” I said. “Grandma has to go.”
I carried the tub out the side door. Nobody held it for me.
Thursday
Three Thursdays later, at 3:40, I was on the swing.
My mail comes to my own box now. I went to the post office on Monroe Street myself and filled out the card, and the man at the counter didn’t ask me anything about my year.
Sylvester’s statement came on the second, and I opened it out here with my thumb. $1,412.
The brochure went in the recycling. The union magnet holds a copy of the revocation now, and behind it the form from Lakeshore’s fraud department, signed Teresa M. Rizzo. They wanted the number that took the verification call. I gave it to them without looking it up. It’s the number I called every Thursday at six to say Addie ate her dinner.
Nobody has called it since except them.
That afternoon there was one more envelope in the box. A stamp, no return address, my name in Joel’s square printing. TERESA RIZZO.
Inside was a sheet of orange construction paper. A brown lump asleep in a bowl, and over it in purple crayon, GRANDMA, with the R backwards.
I stopped the swing with my heels.
Then I uncapped my ballpoint, turned the drawing over, and wrote the date on the back.
If this one got under your skin, send it to somebody who’s ever been told they’re the one who keeps forgetting.
Family loyalty can get tangled up with money and secrets – like in the story of a $300 gift that never left Mom’s glovebox, a daughter who brought receipts to her acceptance dinner, and the pawn ticket Grandma was told was a mower receipt.
