All stories › Family Drama › Purple Dauber › Episode 2
Temporary Checks
Episode 2 of 3 of Purple Dauber by Beth Callahan · free to read
Grandpa’s tab sat on my mother’s kitchen counter with a binder clip on it.
She had taken it Tuesday, out of the purse, while my grandmother napped in the recliner. She told me this the way she told me work had gone fine.
“I’m not proud of it,” she said. “Sit down. You want coffee?”
“Mom,” I said. “You stole her checkbook.”
“I removed it. It’s on my account too.” She poured two cups and did not drink hers. “Here’s the thing nobody says out loud, so I’ll say it. When her money’s gone, it’s gone, and she still has to live somewhere. The care place out past the fairgrounds is six thousand a month. Her house is worth maybe one-forty. Do that math.”
“She’s not going to a care place,” I said.
“Nobody’s going to a care place until they go. And when she goes, who signs? Not you. Not Connie Herrera. Me. My name is on the paperwork, and my name will be on the bills, and I have nine years until I retire and a roof of my own with a tarp on it.”
She pushed the checkbook an inch toward me with one finger, like it was hot.
“So I’m getting power of attorney,” she said. “My lawyer has the form. She can sign it, or she refuses and we do this the hard way. I’d rather she sign.”
I looked at the binder clip. Eleven carbons under it, one word on each. She could have popped the clip and read them any time, and had not.
“Have you looked at it?” I said.
“I don’t need to look at it,” she said. “I’ve seen the statement.”
I did not tell her. I told myself it was Grandma’s to tell. That was true, and it was also easier.
“She drove to the bank,” my mother said on the phone Wednesday. “By herself.”
I got there first. My grandmother was at her kitchen table with a sheet of temporary checks, the plain kind with no name printed, signing each one in the corner in blue ballpoint. A sheet of eight. She was on six.
“They wanted to charge me for a new book,” she said. “I said I’d take the free ones. Twelve dollars for a checkbook. Your grandfather would have opened a vein.”
“Grandma.”
“I know. I know what you’re going to say. I said it to myself in the car.”
My mother came in without knocking and took it in: the sheet, the pen, the six signed checks drying in a row.
“Keys,” she said.
“Janet.”
“Your car keys, Mom. Please.”
“I drive in daylight,” my grandmother said. “I’ve always driven in daylight. I drove to the bank and back and I signaled.”
“You drove to the bank to get around me. That’s not the same as the pharmacy.” My mother held out her hand and kept it there. It was steady. “I’m not taking the car. I’m taking the keys, until the form is signed, and then we’ll talk about the car.”
My grandmother looked at the hand for a long time. Then she took the keys out of her purse herself, so that no one would have to take them from her, and set them in my mother’s palm.
“The ring has the shed key on it,” she said. “You’ll want that for the mower.”
My mother closed her hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. You’re the one who has to mow.”
Nobody laughed. My mother pocketed the keys and looked at the six checks and did not pick them up. Taking those would have been one thing too many for one morning.
“Under the N, thirty-four. N, thirty-four.”
My grandmother won the fourth game that Friday on a straight line, fifty dollars. She raised one hand about shoulder height and waited. She never yelled it. “I raise my hand like a lady,” she had told me my first night, “and I let the runner yell it.” The runner was a high school girl named Kayla, who read the card back to Rudy and yelled it fine.
Bev Turcotte took her fifty in two twenties and a ten, folded it once, and walked it over to the red cardigan.
Connie Herrera shook her head. She pushed it back across the table. My grandmother folded it again, smaller, and tucked it in the cardigan pocket while Connie held both hands up like she was being robbed.
“It’s bingo money,” Connie said, to me, when my grandmother went for coffee. “You tell her. Bingo money doesn’t count. I told her that in July.”
“I don’t think she agrees,” I said.
“Manny forgave your grandfather the year the shop closed. Over a beer. I was there. She knows that.”
I looked at the number board so she would not see my eyes, and one of them ran anyway.
On the drive home my phone lit up on the seat between us. My grandmother read it before I could.
“Your mother says she’s coming next Friday,” she said. “She wants to see this place.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, he says.” She handed the phone back.
“So who’s driving me Friday, you or her?”