Part 2
Part 2 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
Here’s what I believed about my mother, the morning of that phone call.
I believed she had been a school cafeteria manager for twenty-two years and then a receptionist at a dental practice on Far Hills for nine more. I believed she was cheap in a specific and inherited way, the kind of woman who rinsed and reused a freezer bag until it went cloudy. I believed she had buried a husband in 2018 and a son in 2014, in that order in her heart if not on the calendar, and that she had done it without ever once letting anybody see her come apart.
I believed I knew her better than anyone alive, because after Danny and then after Dad there wasn’t anyone else left to know her.
I want that on the record, because of everything that came after. I wasn’t a daughter who didn’t call. I called Sundays. I brought Nora over twice a month. I sat in that kitchen with the wallpaper she never replaced and I asked her how she was and she said fine, and I believed her, and I want it understood that believing her was not laziness. It was thirty-three years of evidence.
I didn’t go to Brandt Street that day.
I want that on the record too.
What I did was drive to work, run the fall transfer numbers, eat a sandwich at my desk, and tell myself it was a records problem. Somebody had used her name. Identity theft happens to dead people constantly, it’s practically a season, and the funeral home had even given us a pamphlet about it with a stock photo of a worried couple on the front.
That held until about four o’clock.
At four o’clock I opened the folder I’d been carrying around in my bag for three weeks, the one with her accounts in it, because I was the executor and nobody tells you that being the executor mostly means being a bad accountant for a person who can’t correct you.
Her checking account went back seven years online. I scrolled.
The fourth of the month, six hundred dollars, cash withdrawal, the branch on Smithville.
August fourth. July fourth. June fourth. May fourth.
I scrolled faster, and my hand got clumsy on the trackpad, and the numbers kept coming up the same. Six hundred. Six hundred. Six hundred. Every month, no exceptions, not the month my father died, not the month she had her gallbladder out, not the month the transmission went on the Buick and she borrowed four hundred dollars from me and paid it back in installments like a stranger because she wouldn’t take money from her own kid.
She took four hundred dollars from me in March of 2021 and she gave it back at fifty dollars a month for eight months and that same year she pulled seven thousand two hundred dollars out of her own account in cash and gave it to a man named Ray Kozak.
I sat in my office until the building emptied out. Somebody’s cart went by in the hall. The heat ticked.
Seven years of statements is eighty-four withdrawals. Ray Kozak had said March of 2015, which meant there were four more years I couldn’t see, which meant one hundred and thirty-seven withdrawals, which meant eighty-two thousand two hundred dollars.
My mother left me a house with a bad roof and eleven thousand dollars.
I went back to the top of the list, to the most recent one, because I had scrolled past it too fast the first time and something about it had snagged and I hadn’t stopped to find out what.
July tenth. Six hundred dollars. Cash.
Not the fourth. The tenth.
She died on the fourteenth.
She had gone to the bank on a Thursday, four days before her heart stopped in the dental office parking lot, and she had taken out six hundred dollars, and nobody ever found it.