I put the sheet of notebook paper back in the safe deposit box, closed the lid, and drove straight to Parkwest Medical Center, because the last line in the pencil of my mother told me to ask the nurse what Dennis did on Tuesday. I am Patricia Monroe, sixty six years old, and I walked down a long hospital corridor in my church shoes with forty one lines about my brother folded in my purse. At the nurses station on the fourth floor, under a poster about washing hands and a clock that ran four minutes slow, a heavyset woman named Lorraine looked up and took off her reading glasses.
“Mrs. Monroe,” she said, before I could speak, “I have been hoping someone would ask me.” She led me to a quiet alcove behind the supply room. Three weeks before my mother passed, she told me, on a Tuesday afternoon, Dennis had come into the room with a man who claimed to be a notary and a form that he called a power of attorney. My mother had been given medicine for her pain. She was drifting in and out. Dennis held the pen in her fingers. Lorraine, who happened to walk in with a tray, refused to let him go on.
“I told them to leave,” said Lorraine. “Your brother called me a name I will not repeat. I wrote it all down, and I told the charge nurse, and she wrote it down too. Your mother woke up that night and looked at me for the longest time. She said, Lorraine, I know what he tried to do. Please make sure my daughter hears it from someone besides him.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I have kept this in my heart for ten weeks.”
A brass key taped inside a cookbook gave one daughter the evening to bring her brother back to the table of their mother in Knoxville.
I gave my terms to Dennis that evening, in the diner on Chapman Highway where our mother had cooked for thirty eight years. I had asked him to meet me there, and he came, in his stained jacket, to the corner booth. I placed the list on the table between us. “Dennis, I know about the forty one things, and I know about Tuesday. Here is what is going to happen. You will return what you can, you will go to the program at the church in Fountain City, and you will sign a paper that you will never touch another thing of hers. In exchange, I will not call the police.”
He looked at the list for a long time. His hand shook as he picked up the coffee. “Patty,” he said, “every time I took something, I told myself she would never notice. And every time, she looked at me with those eyes, and I knew she did.” He covered his face with both hands, and the steam from his untouched coffee rose between his fingers, and out in the lot a school bus hissed and pulled away. “I have been drunk for forty years. I think I started the day Daddy left.” I slid the napkin holder across the table to him. “Then we start there,” I said. “With the day Daddy left.”
But the fear of being found out rose in him one last time. Dennis lunged across the booth, snatched the list and the bond claim form out of my hands, and sprinted for the door of the diner, knocking over a chair. He had gone six steps when the regulars of the counter, old men who had eaten eggs there since my mother started, rose from their stools together. Mr. Pickett stuck out his cane. Mr. Hale, a retired fireman, stood square in the aisle. A waitress named Faye set a pot of coffee on the counter and crossed her arms.
Dennis tripped on the cane and went to his knees on the checkerboard linoleum, and the papers slid across the floor into the shoes of Mr. Hale, who picked them up, squared the edges, and handed them to Faye. She handed them to me. Dennis stayed on his knees, panting, with his head bowed. Nobody laughed. The regulars simply stood there with their hands in their pockets, looking at the floor, because every one of them had loved Hazel Monroe, and every one of them had watched this boy grow up.
The money consequences were set out in a single afternoon. The savings bonds, six hundred and forty thousand dollars at their face, were divided by the instructions on the list of my mother, with a trust for the care of Dennis administered by me, and the rest going to the church, the diner staff and her grandchildren. The brass key I framed. The cookbook I wiped clean with a damp cloth and put on the shelf in my kitchen, where it sits beside the radio. Dennis paid back what he could, which was not much, and a good deal in work.
In the name of my mother Hazel, who passed in the spring, I started the Hazel Monroe Fund. It pays for meals for older people living alone, legal help against financial abuse and treatment for adults with drinking problems, in Knox, Anderson and Loudon counties. In the first year we served nine thousand meals and helped sixty two families protect an aging parent. One was a seamstress in Oak Ridge whose son had been quietly draining her account, and who now sleeps without locking her bedroom door.
On a Sunday in November, Dennis, eleven months sober, came to my kitchen and stood at the stove in an apron. He had asked for the cookbook. He turned the greasy pages slowly, reading the notes in the pencil of our mother, and finally he found the biscuits. Add more butter, said the margin. Dennis loves this. He read it twice, and his shoulders shook, and then he rolled up his sleeves. We made them together, three dozen, and the whole house smelled of Hazel Monroe.
