“…the second property,” I whispered to my empty condo, and I clicked on the little blue address with a finger that would not hold still. The page loaded slowly, as pages do on my old laptop. A photograph appeared. It was a cedar cabin on a hillside above Grand Lake, with a wide screened porch, a stone fireplace, and a long wooden dock stretching into green water. Beneath the picture, the assessor had listed the purchase price, three hundred and ten thousand dollars, paid in cash in April of 2023, by J and K Holdings. I put my hand over my mouth.
I am a payroll clerk by trade, and a payroll clerk never trusts a number she has not checked twice. So I opened a spreadsheet and began to add. Seventy two checks of thirteen hundred and fifty dollars, from March of 2019 to this very month. Ninety seven thousand, two hundred dollars. All of it mailed to Mr. Sims, who had, as he said, forwarded it to a credit union in Broken Arrow. My daughter had told me she was struggling. She had said it in the voice she used as a little girl when she had broken a lamp, a thin, sorry, practiced voice.
I sat for a long time with the cold cup of tea beside my laptop. I thought of every phone call. Mother, I hate to ask. Mother, you do not have to, I just do not know what else to do. I thought of the Christmas she wore a new cashmere coat and told me she had found it at a thrift shop. I thought of Frank, who had worked two jobs for thirty years so that we could leave our daughter something. I could not decide whether to weep or to shout. In the end I did neither. I picked up the telephone and called her.
A cedar cabin on a hillside above Grand Lake, a spreadsheet with seventy two rows, and a check made out to the wrong man.
“Mother,” Jenna said, breathless, on the second ring. “I was just thinking about you. Are you free for lunch on Sunday?” I said that I was, and that I had some news. She laughed, a little too brightly. I told her that Mr. Sims had telephoned me. For a long second, she said nothing at all. I heard the television behind her go suddenly quiet. Then she said, in a flat voice I had not heard from her since the day her father passed, “What exactly did Gary tell you?” I said, “Everything, Jenna. Including the cabin.”
She drove to my condo within the hour. She was forty nine, in a camel coat and expensive boots, her blond hair carefully curled, and she came through my door with her mouth already open to explain. I held up my hand. I put the printed spreadsheet in front of her, and the assessor page for the cabin, and Mr. Sims account slip, and I asked her to read them. She read for a long time. Her lip began to tremble. She sat down on the edge of my sofa, with her coat still on, and covered her face.
It was Kevin idea, she said. At first. He had a plan to buy cheap property and rent it out, and he said it would be a wonderful thing for them, and for Mother, because the returns would be so large that she could never be burdened again. She said they had meant to tell me once the cabin was paid off, as a surprise. I asked why, then, she had told Mr. Sims that I was too proud to send my own checks to her. She said nothing. She stared at her gloves. And I knew that she was too honest, at heart, to lie to me twice in one day.
“Jenna,” I said, “you told me you had broken off with that man in 2019.” She said that she had tried. She said he kept coming back, and that he made her feel as though nobody else would ever love her, and that she was so tired of being alone. It broke my heart, all of it, in the way a mother heart is built to break. I put my hand on her hair. I said, “Sweetheart, I would have given you money if you had asked. I would never have given it to him.”
I did not call the police. But I did call Mr. Raymond Dunn, a retired attorney from our church, who agreed to look into the matter for a modest fee. He sat in my kitchen with his reading glasses on his forehead and a yellow legal pad, and after an hour, he explained the situation to Jenna in plain, friendly words. She could repay what she had taken, or I could press a claim. She had until the end of the month. She wept when he finished. Then she said, quietly, “I will sign over the cabin, Mother. Kevin does not need to be told.”
Kevin was told. He did not take it quietly. He arrived at my door at seven the next evening, a big, loud man in a leather jacket, with a gold chain and a smile like a salesman, and he tried to explain that it had all been a misunderstanding. I let him talk for about a minute. Then I opened the door a little wider and let him see Mr. Dunn, sitting at my kitchen table, with a deputy from the sheriff office beside him, taking notes. Kevin stopped talking. He turned and walked out. I did not see him again.
The cabin is mine now, deeded in my name in June. On the first Saturday of July, the whole family drove up to Grand Lake, Jenna, her two grown children, and me. We sat on the wide screened porch with iced tea and a bowl of cherries. Jenna was quiet, and thinner than I would have liked, but she laughed at her son jokes. After supper, I walked alone to the end of the dock, and sat with my feet over the water. In my purse I carried the last check I ever wrote to Gary Sims, uncashed, and the first rent receipt Jenna ever signed for me.
