Part 3 — The Second Check
Crystal was still holding the statement when the room caught up with what she had done. Ronnie put a hand to his cheek. Nobody laughed, and nobody spoke, and in the quiet I could hear my mother set her china cup down on its saucer with the gentlest click.
“Read it out,” the lawyer said to Crystal, not unkindly. Crystal read it in a voice that cracked in the middle. “Pay to the order of Tanya Brooks. Eighteen hundred dollars.” She looked at my brother. “Who is Tanya Brooks, Ronnie? You told me there was no one before me.”
Ronnie tried three answers in a row. She was a former coworker. She was a business partner. She was nobody. Then my mother, in the small clear voice that used to announce transfers on the hospital switchboard, said, “She is the mother of your son, Ronald. I have known for two years.” Crystal sat down on the arm of the couch as if her knees had been cut.
The lawyer, Mr. Whitcomb, had everything in order. A power of attorney is a trust, he explained, not a gift. Ronnie had been authorized to pay the bills of my mother, not his own. Every check to Tanya Brooks since February was money that belonged to Irene, spent on someone else. Under the law of Illinois, an agent who does that must account for every dollar and repay it, and a court can remove him.
I had been busy, too. Two weeks earlier, after my mother told me to call the number on the slip in her blue tin, I had driven her to her own doctor, who found her mind as sharp as it had ever been. Then I drove her to Mr. Whitcomb, and she told him in her own words what she wanted. She signed new papers with her own hand, and a notary and two witnesses signed beneath her. The power of attorney of Ronnie had been revoked that afternoon, and the bank had been told.
The statements laid out on the coffee table showed twelve checks. Twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars. Ronnie said it was child support. Mr. Whitcomb nodded and said that was a fine thing to pay, from his own wages. He had no right to pay it from the account of a woman in a nursing home who believed her son was looking after her.
Then he turned to the matter of the house. Crystal, he repeated, had thirty days, though he suggested she would not need them. She said she would be gone by morning. At the door she stopped, took off the pink robe of my mother, folded it, and laid it on the arm of the couch. She looked at me and said, “I am sorry. He told me everything was legal.” I believed her, and I told her so.
Ronnie asked at last, in a voice I had not heard since he was twelve, what happened now. My mother answered him. He would repay every dollar, in writing, from his own pay and from the sale of the motorcycle he kept in the garage. He would see the boy, because a child should not be punished for the sins of his father, and he would support him honestly. But he would never again touch her money.
Before he left, Mr. Whitcomb asked me for one thing more. He wanted me to accept the new power of attorney, the one my mother had chosen for herself. I told him I would honor it the way she would want, with receipts for every cent and a ledger open on her kitchen table for anyone to read, including Ronnie, whenever he asked.
A power of attorney is a promise to care for someone, and a promise broken in the dark is mended only in the light.
Mr. Whitcomb had one more envelope, and it was for me. My mother would not be going back to the place by the interstate. Her house, free of its visitors, would be ready by Friday, and with a nurse three days a week and me in the spare room, she could live in it as long as she wished. She gave a small nod, the same one she used to give a caller she was about to put through.
We finished her birthday right there, in her own living room. I washed her china cup and set it in front of her, and I made her afternoon cup the way she likes it, hot and strong, with two sugars. She lifted it with both hands, closed her eyes, and breathed in as if she were smelling the whole of her life.
On Friday I drove her home, and the pink robe was back in her closet. The blue tin went back in the pantry, behind the flour. On Monday a small boy of three stood at the door beside Ronnie, holding a drawing in both fists. My mother knelt as far as her hip allowed and told him that his grandmother had been waiting a long time to meet him.
