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.
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Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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