“Grandma didn’t trust her,” I said. “Grandma was too sick to know who she was.”
“That makes it worse, honey. Not better.”
By nine o’clock that night, Margie had drafted a demand letter. It was three pages long and very calm. It explained that the funds Diane Mercer had withdrawn on March 14 belonged to the estate of Rose Ann Walsh, that they had been specifically designated for her granddaughter, Eleanor, and that the power of attorney used to withdraw them was being challenged as invalid. It demanded that the full amount, $26,418.37, be returned to the estate within ten business days. It said that a report had been made to the county’s financial crimes unit, and that the estate reserved all rights.
The medical records came to my email the next morning, faster than I expected, because I knew one of the women in the records office from my shifts. I opened them at Margie’s kitchen table.
March 14. 8:40 a.m. Patient received increased dose of morphine per order. Patient drowsy, oriented to self only. Did not recognize daughter on arrival. Asked nurse twice what year it was.
Oriented to self only. She knew she was Rose. That was all she knew.
Margie read it over my shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She just put her hand on my back and kept it there.
At ten o’clock, I sat down with Detective Alvarez in a small room at the county building and told her everything again. She was in her forties, with short black hair and a tired, kind face. She took notes on a yellow pad. When I showed her the nurses’ notes, she nodded slowly.
“This is strong,” she said. “This is very strong. The notary will be our first conversation. Notaries are supposed to make sure the person signing is competent. Gary’s going to have some explaining to do.” She looked at me. “I have to ask you something, and I want you to think about it. Do you want to press this? Your mother could be charged. This could be a felony at this amount.”
I thought about it. I thought about Mom kneeling down in the driveway zipping up my yellow raincoat.
“I want my grandmother’s money back,” I said. “I want my mother to understand what she did. I don’t know about the rest yet.”
Alvarez nodded. “That’s an honest answer. Let me do my job, and you’ll have some time to decide. Prosecution isn’t up to you alone, but what the victim’s family wants matters. A lot.”
When I got back to Margie’s, she was sitting at the kitchen table with the demand letter in an envelope.
“We can mail it,” she said. “Certified. She’ll get it at home in two or three days.”
I looked at the envelope.
“No,” I said. “I want her to get it today.”
Margie raised an eyebrow. “At her house?”
“She won’t open the door. She’ll see it’s from you and she’ll throw it out before Rick gets home. She’s done it before with Grandma’s letters.” I took a breath. “She works at First County Bank. On Oak Street. She’s the assistant branch manager.”
Margie went very still. “She works at a bank.”
“Twelve years.”
“And she took a vulnerable woman’s account using a power of attorney obtained from someone who didn’t know her own name.” Margie closed her eyes. “Ellie, honey, if First County finds out about this, she’s done. Banks don’t keep employees who are investigated for financial exploitation.”
“I know.”
“Is that what you want?”
I didn’t answer right away. I’d like to say I was thinking of something noble. I wasn’t. I was thinking about Grandma’s coat. The elbows. The lining, twice.
“I want her to look at what she did,” I said. “Somewhere she can’t throw it in the trash.”
That night I went back to Grandma’s house, the house where I still lived, and I got out a paper shopping bag. One of the nice ones, from a department store, with rope handles. I didn’t put the demand letter in it right away. First, I went to the hall closet and took down Grandma’s old brown wool coat.
I folded it carefully and put it at the bottom of the bag.
Then I went to the kitchen drawer where I kept my birthday cards. All twenty-two of them. The cartoon cat. The puppy in a party hat. The one with the glitter rainbow from when I was nine, which still shed glitter on everything it touched. Every one with a deposit slip still inside.
I tied them together with one of Grandma’s old hair ribbons and laid them on top of the coat.
Then the printout from Lakeside, with the March 14 withdrawal highlighted in yellow. The nurses’ notes from that morning, with one line circled. Oriented to self only. The demand letter. And the business card Detective Alvarez had given me, with the case number written on the back in her handwriting.
On top of all of it, I put one sticky note.
She patched this coat for six winters so you could buy an SUV.
By eight thirty the next morning, everything was in place.
I drove to Oak Street and parked across from First County Bank. Through the big front windows, I could see her. She was at the desk near the front, the one with the little brass nameplate, laughing at something a man in a suit had said, touching her hair.
A courier on a bicycle was waiting for me on the corner. Margie had arranged it. I handed him the bag. I told him to deliver it to Diane Mercer personally and to get her signature.
He went inside. I watched through the window. I saw her look up. I saw her smile at him, her professional smile. I saw her sign. I saw her open the bag right there at her desk, in front of everyone, the way she always opened presents.
I saw her pull out the coat.
I started the car and drove away before I could see the rest.
I made it four blocks before my phone rang.
She was in hysterics. She was screaming before I could even say hello.
“What have you done?! How am I supposed to show my face at work now?”
I pulled over into the parking lot of a closed-down Blockbuster. I put the phone on speaker and set it on the dashboard and let her scream.
“Do you know who was standing at my desk? Do you have any idea? My regional manager! He was standing right there! He saw the whole thing! He saw the police card, Ellie! The detective’s card! He picked it up off my desk and looked at it and put it in his pocket!” Her voice broke into a sob. “He said we need to talk this afternoon. Do you know what that means? Do you know what you’ve done to me?”
“Do you know what you did to Grandma?” I said.
“Oh, don’t you start. Don’t you dare start with that.” I heard a door close on her end. She must have gone into a bathroom or a supply room. Her voice dropped to a hiss. “That was my mother’s money. My mother’s. I’m her daughter. I had every right to it.”
“It was in an account with my name on it, Mom.”
“She put it there to spite me!”
That stopped me. I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel.
“What are you talking about?”
“Every year.” Her voice was shaking. “Every single year, she put a thousand dollars in that account for you. And what did she ever give me? Nothing. Not a dime. When I needed help with Kayla’s daycare, she said no. When Rick got laid off in 2012, she said no. Twenty-two thousand dollars, Ellie. She put twenty-two thousand dollars in your name while my girls went without.”
“Your girls didn’t go without. Your girls have a basketball hoop and a two-car garage.”
“You don’t know anything about my life!”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t. You made sure of that.”
Silence.
I could hear her breathing. Fast. Ragged.
“She was sick,” I said. “She was dying. She was on so much morphine she didn’t know what year it was. The nurses wrote it down. She asked me if it was you, Mom. After you sat with her for half an hour, she asked me who you were. And you sent me downstairs for a latte so you could have Gary put a pen in her hand.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“I have the records. I have the bank statement. I have the date.”
“That money was going to come to me anyway. When she died. I’m her only child. I just took it a little early.”
“It was never going to come to you,” I said. “It was in a separate account with my name on it. And her will left you exactly what you gave her in the last twenty years. You can ask Margie what that was.”
She didn’t say anything. I knew she knew.
“I called you from the hospital,” I said, and now my own voice was shaking. “In October. I begged you. I stood in that hallway and I begged you for two hundred dollars for her medication, and you said you had your own family to think about. Five months later, you took twenty-six thousand dollars and bought yourself a car.”
“I was going to pay it back.”
“When?”
“Eventually! When things got better!”
“You bought laptops, Mom. You went to the Poconos. You posted pictures.”
She started crying then. Really crying. The kind of crying where you can’t talk. I sat in the Blockbuster parking lot and listened to my mother sob, and I wanted, I really wanted, to feel something like triumph. I didn’t. I felt sick.
“The letter says ten business days,” I said, when she finally quieted down. “Twenty-six thousand, four hundred and eighteen dollars and thirty-seven cents, back into Grandma’s estate. That’s all I want.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then Detective Alvarez is going to have a lot of questions for you. And for Gary.”
“You’d do that to your own mother?”
“You did it to yours,” I said.
She hung up.
I sat in the car for a long time after that. I drove home, and I went into the house, and I stood in the hallway in front of the closet where Grandma’s coat used to hang. There was just an empty wooden hanger now.
I sat down on the floor and cried until I fell asleep against the closet door.
When I woke up, it was afternoon and my phone had nine missed calls. Most were from Mom. Two were from a number I didn’t recognize.
It rang again while I was holding it. The unknown number.
“Hello?”
“Ellie? It’s Rick. Your mom’s husband.”
I sat up. I had met Rick maybe fifteen times in my whole life. He was a big, quiet man with a mustache who always shook my hand too hard and called me “kiddo.” I didn’t really know anything about him except that he sold flooring and liked the Eagles.
“Hi, Rick.”
“I’m sorry to call you out of the blue.” His voice was slow and careful. “Diane came home in the middle of the day. She’s been crying for two hours. She won’t tell me what’s going on. She just keeps saying you’re trying to destroy her.” He paused. “So I went through her purse. I’m not proud of it. And I found a letter from a lawyer.”
I closed my eyes.
“Is it true?” he said. “What it says? That the money for the car came from your grandmother’s account?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t say anything for a while.
“She told me it was a bonus,” he said finally. “From work. She said she got a big bonus for hitting her numbers. I believed her.” He laughed, a terrible, hollow laugh. “I sold flooring for twenty-six years. You’d think I’d know when somebody’s selling me something.”
“I’m sorry, Rick.”
“Don’t you be sorry. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” I heard him take a long breath. “Kiddo, I didn’t know about the hospital either. About you calling. She told me you called asking for money for school, and she told you no. She never said it was for your grandmother’s medicine.”
My throat closed up. I couldn’t say anything.
“I’d have given it to you,” he said quietly. “I want you to know that. I’m not rich, but I’d have found it.”
“Thank you,” I managed.
“I’m going to sort this out on my end,” he said. “I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to.”
That night, I got a message on Instagram. I almost didn’t open it. The profile picture was a girl in a volleyball uniform with her hair in a high ponytail.
It was Kayla. My half-sister. She was sixteen.
Is it true? Mom says you’re trying to send her to jail.
I looked at that message for a long time. I thought about the Christmas cards. The matching sweaters. The girl in the photo I’d stared at so many times, trying to find myself in her face.
I’m not trying to send anyone to jail, I wrote. I’m trying to get back money Grandma saved for me. Mom took it while Grandma was very sick.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Did she buy the car with it?
Yes.
And our laptops?
I hesitated. Then I wrote: Yes.
Nothing for a long time. Then:
I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.
I know you didn’t, I wrote back. None of this is your fault.
Another long pause.
I don’t even remember Grandma that well, she wrote. Mom never took us there. Was she nice?
I put the phone down on my chest and looked at the ceiling. Then I picked it back up.
She was the best person I ever knew, I wrote.Five days went by. Nothing from Mom. Nothing from Rick. Kayla messaged me a few times, small things, a photo of her volleyball team, a question about whether nursing school was hard. I answered all of them. It felt strange, like talking through a wall to someone in the next room who I’d always heard but never seen.
Detective Alvarez called on the third day.
“I spoke to Gary Pruitt,” she said. “The notary. He folded in about four minutes. Said Diane told him her mother was a little tired but fine. Said he didn’t ask any questions because she was a friend of Rick’s. He’s very worried about his commission right now. He’s being very helpful.”
“What happens next?”
“Next, I talk to your mother. I’ve left two messages. She hasn’t called back.” Alvarez paused. “Her lawyer called me instead. She’s hired a lawyer. That tells me she understands how serious this is.”
On the sixth day, I finally opened Grandma’s letter.
I’d been carrying it around in my purse since Margie gave it to me. I hadn’t been able to. Every time I took it out, my hands started shaking, and I put it away again. But that evening, I sat down at the kitchen table, in Grandma’s chair, with a cup of the cheap black tea she always bought, and I opened it.
It was four pages, in her careful, slanting handwriting. She must have written it before she got really sick, because the letters were still steady.
My Ellie girl,
If you are reading this, I’m gone, and Margie decided it was time. She’s a smart woman, so I’ll trust her judgment.
First, the important thing. I love you more than all the stars. I always have. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’m not saying that because you’re the only one reading this.
Second. I need to tell you something about the money.
I didn’t put that money away just for your future. I put it away because I was scared. I was scared that if anything ever happened to me, you’d be alone, the way you were in my driveway that day with your two grocery bags. I couldn’t stand that. So every year I put away what I could. I wanted you to have a floor under your feet. Something nobody could take away from you.
I know your mother thinks I did it to hurt her. She told me so, more than once. She thinks I loved you more. Maybe I did, a little. You were here, and she wasn’t. But I want you to know something about her, and I want you to listen even if you’re angry.
Your mother was nineteen when she had you. Your father left before you were born. She was a scared, angry little girl, and I was hard on her. Harder than I should have been. I was her mother, and I didn’t know how to help her, so I criticized her instead. I told her she’d ruined her life. I said that to my own daughter when she was holding you in the hospital. I’ve regretted it every day for twenty-six years.
When she left you with me, I was angry. I was angry for years. But I’ve come to think now that she left you here because some part of her knew I’d do a better job than she could. And I think she has never forgiven either of us for being right.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll forgive her. That’s your choice. I’m telling you because someday she may come to you needing something. And when she does, I want you to remember that she was my little girl once too. That’s all.
The money is yours. Go be a nurse. Go be a good one. You already are.
Love,
Grandma
P.S. Throw out that brown coat. It’s done. I just didn’t want to admit it.
I read it three times. The third time, I laughed out loud at the postscript, in the empty kitchen, with tears running down my face. Then I put my head down on the table and cried for my grandmother, and for my mother, and for a nineteen-year-old girl in a hospital bed I’d never met, being told she’d ruined her life.
On the seventh day, there was a knock on the door.
It was Mom.
I almost didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she had on an old sweatshirt and jeans. She was holding the department store bag with the rope handles.
She held it out to me.
“I didn’t want to keep the coat,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “It’s not mine.”
I took it. I looked inside. The coat was folded on top. The cards were tied with the same ribbon. She had put everything back the way I’d sent it.
“Can I come in?” she asked. “Just for a minute. I won’t stay.”
