“Name,” Mom said, and her hands tightened in her lap. “My maiden name, Bradley. Halvorsen. Ruth Marie Halvorsen. Tara said nobody has called me that in sixty years, so nobody would think to look. She said a home in Spokane would take me for cash, no questions, and I would be there until I passed.” Her pale eyes found my face across the sunlit kitchen. “I kept thinking, my son writes to me every week, and he will wonder where my letters went. And then I thought, Tara has my letters, so he will never wonder.” I put my head on the table.
Mr. Two Bulls picked up his telephone and did not put it down for three hours. He found it on his sixth call, a care facility in Spokane called Pine Haven, which confirmed that an admission was scheduled for Friday for a Ruth Halvorsen, age eighty five, the paperwork paid for in advance, with cash, by a niece named Tara. The director sounded sick when she heard the story. She agreed to say nothing and let the niece arrive. Two detectives from the Spokane police were already on their way to the lobby.
The letters, meanwhile, were coming home. Mr. Two Bulls laid all twenty two on the kitchen table in order of date, and Mom read one a day for twenty two days, in the corner by the sunny window with her glasses on the end of her nose. She laughed over the jokes about pipeline mud. She cried over the one about the northern lights above Prudhoe Bay. When she finished the last one, she folded it and pressed it against her chest, and she said, “My boy has been talking to me the entire time.”
The heart at the end of a real letter is never quite drawn the same way twice.
Tara walked into Pine Haven on Friday at ten in a new blazer, with a briefcase, a folder, and a vague smile. She handed the receptionist a power of attorney and a form, and the receptionist asked if she would wait one moment for the director. Two detectives came out of the office instead. Tara held up the folder, as if the paper could protect her, and said, “I am only the caregiver.” One of the detectives, a patient woman, said, “Then you will have no trouble explaining the plywood.”
The power of attorney was voided by a judge in Yellowstone County in a single hearing. Social Security reinstated the address of my mother and her old bank, and every dollar that had been moved was traced and returned, sixty one thousand dollars in all. The signature on the document was identified by a handwriting expert as a copy, perfect except for one thing. The little heart at the bottom of Love, Mama had been drawn too neatly, the expert said, because real hearts drawn by real hands are never quite the same twice.
Tara received six years for fraud, forgery, and exploitation of an elderly person. The two other cousins took plea deals and probation. Shelly came to see me in the driveway on the last day before sentencing. She stood with a crumpled tissue in her fist. “Brad,” she said, “I did not mean for it to go so far.” I looked at her for a very long time. “Shelly,” I said, “it started with a sheet of plywood. Somebody picks up the hammer. That is when it begins.” She nodded, and I went inside, and I did not look back.
I took a job with a pipeline company in Billings, a maintenance supervisor, home by five thirty, no more rotations on the north slope. My knee healed by Christmas. On my first Saturday off, I tore out the little window in the storage room and framed a big one, a picture window with a deep sill and a cushion. I cut the opening myself with a reciprocating saw while Mom sat in her chair and shouted advice. The finished wall looked out over the Rimrocks, glowing gold in the afternoon sun.
Then I took the vacuum, the ironing board, and the boxes out of the room entirely and turned it into a sewing and reading room, her own idea. She hung a quilt. I installed a bookshelf, and a good lamp, and a little table for tea. In the morning, the sun pours across the floor, and she sits there in her robe, the one the cousin left behind, which she washed three times and decided to keep, because she said she was not going to let a thief ruin a perfectly good robe.
We have not stopped writing. Every Sunday evening, I find an envelope under my bedroom door, three pages in her round beautiful hand, full of news about the neighbors and the garden and what she is cooking. I write back on Monday and leave my reply on her pillow. It is a ridiculous custom for two people who live in the same house, and it is the best thing in my week. We have both agreed never to give it up.
The shoebox sits on the shelf above her desk, with all twenty two letters inside, and now with a hundred more. On the lid, she has written in red ink, Letters from my boy. Last night, I opened her latest. It was short, only a few lines. At the bottom, in her flowing hand, was a curly R, a looping B, and the words Love, Mama, with a little heart. This one was a bit crooked. I held it to the lamp, and I knew it was real.
