“I’m sorry, ma’am. But the entire balance was withdrawn several months ago.”
The teller said it gently, the way nurses say things in hallways. I knew that voice. I had used it myself.
“There must be a mistake,” I said. My fingers were gripping the edge of the counter so hard they hurt. “Please check again.”
She was young, maybe twenty-two, with a name tag that said Priya and a little gold cross on a chain around her neck. She looked at me for a second. Then she looked back at her screen and typed something, and frowned, and typed again.
In my other hand I was holding Grandma’s last birthday card. It was a cheap card from the drugstore, with a cartoon cat on the front wearing a party hat. Inside, in her shaky handwriting, it said: Happy 26th, my Ellie girl. For your future. Love you more than all the stars. And tucked inside, the way it had been every single year since I was four years old, was a deposit slip from Lakeside Credit Union.
$1,000.00.
“I’m so sorry,” Priya said again. Then she did something I don’t think she was supposed to do. She turned her monitor toward me.
There it was. The account Grandma had opened for me twenty-two years ago. A long column of deposits, one every March, a thousand dollars each time. A little interest here and there. A balance that had reached $26,418.37.
And then, on March 14 of this year, one withdrawal. The whole thing. Account closed.
Beside the withdrawal was a name.
Diane Mercer. Acting under power of attorney.
My mother.
I stood there and read her name three times. I don’t know what my face looked like. Priya reached over and touched my wrist.
“Do you want to sit down?”
“No,” I said. “No. I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine. I was standing in a credit union on a Tuesday morning in my scrubs, because I had come straight from a night shift, and I was holding a birthday card with a cartoon cat on it, and the floor was moving under my feet.
March 14.
I knew that date. I knew it the way you know the date of a car accident. It was the only day my mother came to see Grandma in the hospital.
Mom left me with Grandma when I was four.
I remember it better than I should. Most people don’t remember anything from when they’re four, but I remember that day. I remember it was raining, and Mom’s car was a red Honda with a dent in the passenger door, and she had packed my clothes in two grocery bags. I remember she kneeled down in Grandma’s driveway and zipped up my yellow raincoat to my chin.
“Just until I get settled,” she said. “Okay, baby? Just a little while. Then I’ll come back for you.”
I remember she smelled like strawberry gum. I remember she didn’t look at Grandma when she got back in the car.
She got settled. It took her about a year. She married a man named Rick who sold commercial flooring, and they bought a house forty minutes away in Westbrook, with a two-car garage and a basketball hoop over it. Then she had two more daughters. Kayla, when I was ten. Madison, when I was thirteen.
She never came back for me.
I don’t want to make it sound like she vanished. She didn’t. That might have been easier. She called on my birthday most years. She sent a card at Christmas with a family photo inside, the four of them in matching sweaters in front of a tree, and I would stare at it for a long time trying to find myself somewhere in their faces. Sometimes she’d come to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner and leave before pie. She always had a reason. Kayla had a fever. Rick’s mother was visiting. The roads were bad.
The roads were always bad.
I stayed with Grandma. And Grandma was everything.
She taught me to read at her kitchen table with a stack of old Reader’s Digests. She taught me to ride a bike in the church parking lot, running behind me holding the seat even though she had bad knees and I could hear her wheezing. She sat up with me through chicken pox, two broken wrists, a hundred nightmares, and my first real heartbreak at sixteen, when Tyler Booth broke up with me by text and I cried so hard I made myself sick. She held my hair back over the toilet and said, “That boy has the brains of a cinder block, and someday you’re going to forget his middle name.”
She was right. I have.
She was the person I shared every tear with. Every joy. Every stupid little thing that happened at school. She worked at the dry cleaner on Main Street until she was sixty-eight, and every day when I got off the bus, she’d be home by four, with a plate of apple slices and peanut butter on the counter and the radio playing old country songs.
And every birthday, in every card, there was a deposit slip.
The first time, I didn’t understand it. I was five. I thought it was a coupon. Grandma laughed and pulled me onto her lap and explained it to me.
“This is money,” she said. “Real money. I’m putting it in the bank for you, and every year I’m going to put in a little more, and it’s going to grow and grow like a tomato plant. And when you’re big, it’s going to help you do whatever you want to do.”
“Can I buy a pony?”
“You can buy whatever you want, when you’re big. But you have to promise me something.” She held up her pinky finger. “You can’t touch it until I’m gone. While I’m here, I’ll take care of you. That’s my job. This is for after.”
“After what?”
She kissed the top of my head. “After a long, long time.”
I hooked my pinky around hers. I promised.
It got harder to keep that promise as I got older. Because I started to understand what a thousand dollars meant to Grandma.Grandma lived on her Social Security and what she earned at the dry cleaner, and later on just the Social Security. A thousand dollars was not a small thing. A thousand dollars was every spare dime she had, all year, put away in a coffee can on top of the fridge until it was time to take it to the bank.
I watched her patch her old brown wool coat for six winters in a row. The elbows. The pockets. The lining, twice. I offered to buy her a new one for Christmas when I was seventeen and working at the grocery store. She told me to put the money in my own account instead.
“This coat has another ten years in it,” she said. “Like me.”
I watched her cut coupons. I watched her turn the heat down to sixty-two and wear two sweaters in the house. I watched her skip her own doctor’s appointments because the co-pay was forty dollars. And every March, I watched her drive to Lakeside Credit Union with an envelope of cash and come home with a deposit slip, and every year that number got a little bigger.
“Grandma, please,” I said once, when I was nineteen. “Use some of it. Just for the furnace. I don’t need it.”
She looked at me over her reading glasses.
“Eleanor Rose,” she said. She only used my full name when she meant business. “You made me a promise.”
“I was five.”
“A promise is a promise. You’re going to be a nurse. Nursing school costs money. And I am not going to be here forever to help you with it.” She went back to her crossword. “Furnace is fine. Furnace is older than you and tougher than both of us.”
I got into the nursing program at Bellmont Community College when I was twenty-three. I’d waited a few years, working as a nursing assistant to save money and get experience. I did my prerequisites at night. I was halfway through the program, top of my class in clinicals, when Grandma started losing weight.
She said it was nothing. She said she wasn’t hungry. By the time I made her see a doctor, the cancer was in her pancreas and her liver both.
The doctor gave her six months. She lived for eleven. She always did like to prove people wrong.
I put school on hold. I had to. Someone had to take her to treatments, manage her medications, sleep beside her bed on the bad nights. I picked up extra shifts at the hospital on the weekends to pay for what Medicare wouldn’t. Her prescriptions alone cost more than my rent would have.
I was so tired that I fell asleep standing up in an elevator once and woke up on the fourth floor with no idea how I’d gotten there.
It was in October, about five months in, when the hospital billing department called. We were behind. Three thousand dollars behind, and there was a new medication her oncologist wanted to try that insurance wouldn’t cover. I was standing in the hallway outside her room on the oncology floor, with the vending machine humming next to me, and I didn’t know what else to do.
So I called my mother.
She picked up on the fifth ring. I could hear a television in the background. Someone was laughing on a game show.
“Ellie? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Grandma,” I said. “She’s not doing well. There’s a medication her doctor wants to try, and the bills are piling up, and I’ve been working every shift I can, but I’m short. I’m really short, Mom. I wouldn’t ask if I had anywhere else to go.”
There was a silence on the line. I heard her cover the phone and say something to somebody. Then she came back.
“Ellie, I can’t.”
“I’m not asking for a lot. Even five hundred would help. Even two hundred.”
“I have my own family to think about.” Her voice was flat. Final. “Madison needs braces. Kayla’s got a travel volleyball team. Rick’s commissions are down this year. There’s no money for you.”
There’s no money for you.
Not for Grandma. For you. As if I’d asked for a vacation.
“She’s your mother,” I said.
“I know who she is, Ellie.” Something sharp came into her voice. “Believe me, I know. Look, I have to go. Tell her I hope she feels better.”
She hung up.
I stood in that hallway and stared at the vending machine. There was a bag of Doritos stuck halfway down in one of the coils, hanging there, never falling. I don’t know why I remember that. I stood there looking at it until a nurse I knew walked by and asked if I was okay.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I went back into Grandma’s room and sat down beside her bed. She was awake. She looked at my face.
“You called your mother,” she said.
I didn’t answer.
She reached over and patted my hand. Her skin was so thin by then. Like tissue paper.
“Don’t you worry about the money,” she said. “We’ll figure it out. We always figure it out, don’t we?”
We did figure it out, for a while. I sold my car and bought an older one. I took more shifts. Her church took up a collection. We got by.
And then, in March, my mother showed up.
It was a Thursday. March 14. I’d come in early to bring Grandma her favorite lemon yogurt, and when I walked into the room, Mom was sitting in the chair by the bed with a big bouquet of grocery store tulips in her lap. She was wearing a camel-colored coat and her hair was done. There was a man standing by the window in a gray suit, with a briefcase.
“Ellie!” Mom stood up and hugged me. She hadn’t hugged me in years. I stood there stiffly with the yogurt in my hand. “Look at you. You look exhausted, honey.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see my mother,” she said. “Is that a crime?”
I looked at Grandma. Grandma was propped up on her pillows, blinking slowly. They had increased her morphine the night before because the pain had gotten very bad. Her eyes were cloudy. She smiled at me, but she looked confused, like she wasn’t sure what day it was.
“Who’s he?” I asked, nodding at the man.
“Oh, that’s Gary. He’s a friend of Rick’s. He’s a notary. I just need Mom to sign a couple of things. Insurance stuff. So I can help with the bills.”
“You said you couldn’t help with the bills.”
Mom’s smile got a little tighter. “Well, I’m trying to now. Okay? I’m trying.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “Ellie, why don’t you go down and get us some coffees? I’d love a latte. You look like you could use one too.”
I should have stayed. I know that now. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. But I was so tired, and she was being nice to me, and some small, stupid four-year-old part of me wanted so badly to believe that she had finally come back.
So I took the twenty and went downstairs.
When I came back with the coffees twenty minutes later, Gary was gone. Mom was putting on her coat.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “Kayla’s got a game. But I’m so glad I came.” She kissed Grandma on the forehead. She kissed my cheek. She took her latte and left.
Grandma looked at me with her cloudy eyes.
“Was that Diane?” she asked.
“Yeah, Grandma. That was Mom.”
“Oh,” she said softly, and closed her eyes. “That’s nice. She came.”
Two weeks later, Mom sent me a picture. It was a white SUV in a dealership lot with a big red bow on the hood. Her text said: Finally treated myself!! Rick’s been on me forever to get rid of the old one.
A month after that, there was a photo on her Facebook of Kayla and Madison, each holding up a brand new silver laptop, grinning. Back to school early!! Proud mama.
Then shopping bags. A weekend at a lake resort in the Poconos. New patio furniture.
I kept wondering where she’d gotten the money. Rick’s commissions were down. She’d told me so. Madison needed braces.
Grandma died on the first of August, at home, in her own bed, with me holding her hand and the radio playing Patsy Cline.
Mom came to the funeral twenty minutes late. She cried louder than anyone. She told the pastor what a wonderful mother Grandma had been. She left before the luncheon.
And now I was standing in Lakeside Credit Union, looking at her name on a screen.
I thanked Priya. I don’t remember walking to the parking lot. I remember sitting in my car with the engine off and Grandma’s birthday card in my lap, staring at the cartoon cat, and my hands shaking so hard I couldn’t put the key in the ignition.
I sat there until they stopped. It took a long time.
Then I picked up my phone and made one call.
“Margie? It’s Ellie,” I said. “I need your help. But Mom can’t know beforehand.”
Margaret Holloway had been Grandma’s best friend for forty-one years.
They met at church when they were both young mothers. Margie went on to law school at thirty-five, after her divorce, and spent twenty-five years as a family attorney in town before she retired. She still had her license. She still did wills and estates for people from church, mostly for free, mostly because she said she’d go out of her mind otherwise. She had drawn up Grandma’s will. She had read it aloud to me in her living room two weeks after the funeral, while I sat on her flowered couch and held a cup of tea I didn’t drink.
When she opened her front door that afternoon, she was wearing gardening gloves and a sun hat. She took one look at me and pulled the gloves off.
“Come inside,” she said. “Sit down. Tell me.”
I told her. I showed her the printout Priya had given me. I told her about March 14, and Gary the notary, and the twenty-dollar bill, and the white SUV with the red bow.
Margie listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment. Then she took off her reading glasses and pressed her fingers against her eyes.
“That woman,” she said softly. “Oh, Rose. Oh, honey.”
“Can she do that? Legally? Just walk in with a notary and get Grandma to sign?”
“No,” Margie said. “Not like that. A power of attorney means you’re supposed to act in the person’s best interest. You’re a fiduciary. You can use the money to pay their bills, their care, their needs. You can’t take it to buy yourself a car.” She put her glasses back on. “And there’s a bigger problem for your mother.”
“What?”
“Your grandmother couldn’t have legally signed anything that day. Not if she was on the morphine you’re describing. To sign a power of attorney, a person has to understand what they’re signing. Was she confused? Disoriented?”
“She asked me if it was Diane,” I said. “Her own daughter. She’d been sitting there with her for half an hour, and she asked me who it was.”
Margie nodded slowly. “We need her medical records from that day. The nurses’ notes. Can you get those?”
“I can request them. I’m her next of kin. I’m the executor.”
“Good.” She got up and went to an old wooden filing cabinet in the corner of the room and opened the bottom drawer. “There’s something else. I was going to give you this when you finished school. Rose asked me to. But I think you need it now.”
She came back with a thick cream-colored envelope. On the front, in Grandma’s handwriting, it said: For Ellie. When the time is right.
My hands started shaking again.
“Read it later,” Margie said gently. “Not now. Now we work.”
We worked all afternoon and into the evening. Margie made phone calls. I made phone calls. I called the hospital records department and requested everything from March. I called Priya at Lakeside, who gave me the name of the credit union’s fraud officer. Margie called an old friend, Detective Lena Alvarez, who worked financial crimes for the county and specialized in elder abuse cases.
“Elder financial exploitation is a crime in this state,” Margie said, after she hung up. “Taking money from a vulnerable adult by abusing a power of attorney. Lena says she sees it every week. Sons, daughters, nieces. Usually it’s somebody the person trusted.”
