My Son Packed My Suitcase and Told Me It Was for My Own Good

It’s 9:40 on Friday morning, and my suitcase is standing by my own front door. I didn’t pack it. Shawna did, last night, while I was at the kitchen sink. She folded my nightgowns wrong and put my good shoes on top, so the heels are pressing into my church dress. I noticed that. I notice everything. I just don’t say it anymore.

Curtis is sitting across from me in Ansel’s chair, wearing the blue shirt he wears to the bank. There’s a paper in front of me with a pen laid across it. Next to my plate is a pharmacy bag with my blood pressure pills, like they packed those too.

“Sign it before ten, Mom,” he says. “The realtor’s coming. The van from Maple Crest comes at noon. Let’s keep this nice.”

Maple Crest. They circled a bed number in red ink, 14B, like it’s a hotel room I won.

Ansel built this house in 1991 with a borrowed truck and his brother’s help. Me and him poured the back steps ourselves. I still have the scar on my thumb from that summer. When he died two winters ago, Curtis and Shawna showed up four days after the funeral with their furniture in a rented trailer. “You shouldn’t be alone in this big place, Mom.” By February I was sleeping on a cot in the laundry room, and they were sleeping in the bedroom where Ansel took his last breath.

Then came the money. Every month on the first, $147 out of my Social Security, in cash. “Utilities, Mom. Everybody chips in.” Some months I had $31 left for groceries after my pills. In May Curtis bought a bass boat. It sits under a tarp in the driveway where Ansel’s old Buick used to be.

My back aches every morning from that cot. I get up slow, one hand on the dryer.

In March I woke at 2 a.m. for water and heard Curtis on the phone in the kitchen. “Three eighty-five, maybe more with the lot. Once she’s in Maple Crest we list it. She won’t know the difference.” Then he laughed. It was Ansel’s laugh, coming out of my son’s mouth while he talked about selling my life.

The next morning Shawna patted my hand and said I must’ve been dreaming again.

I wasn’t dreaming. I went back to my laundry room, sat on the cot until the sun came up, and made some decisions.

My phone has a cracked screen and sits at 9 percent most days, because Shawna “borrowed” my charger. My voicemail is full of messages Curtis doesn’t know about. And I keep one paper folded inside the hymnal on my nightstand, because nobody in this house has opened a hymnal in years.

“Mom.” Curtis taps the pen. “Are you even listening? Shawna, she’s doing it again.”

Shawna leans in the doorway with her coffee. “If she won’t sign, we tell Judge Harlan she’s confused. Confused people don’t get a say, Loretta.”

I fold my hands on the table. They aren’t shaking anymore. They shook for a whole year, but not today.

“Before I sign anything,” I say, “you should talk to the owner of this house.”

Curtis laughs. “Dad’s dead, Mom.”

“I know where your father is,” I say. “I visit him every Sunday.”

The doorbell rings at 9:58.

My son thinks I’m a confused old woman. I’m not. I’m a quiet one. There’s a difference, and in about two minutes he’s going to learn it.

Curtis opens the door with his realtor smile on. It drops off his face like a plate hitting the floor. It’s not the realtor. It’s a woman in navy scrubs holding a manila envelope and a ring of brass keys. Shawna says “Who is that?” and Curtis whispers a name I haven’t heard him say out loud in 9 years. Then the woman looks past him, straight at me, and says “Hi, Mama.”

“Junie,” Curtis says. It comes out like he’s choking on it.

My daughter steps into the hallway. She’s thinner than at Ansel’s funeral, where she stood by the cemetery fence because Curtis told the funeral director she wasn’t family anymore. She drove up from Tulsa this morning after a night shift. I can tell by her eyes.

“Who’s Junie?” Shawna asks.

“My sister,” Curtis says, and then he catches himself. “She’s nobody. She stole from Dad when he was dying. She doesn’t come in here.”

Junie doesn’t argue. She walks to the kitchen table, sets the manila envelope down on top of the transfer paper, and slides it toward him.

“Open it.”

He doesn’t, so Shawna does. Her coffee goes down on the counter too hard. I watch her read the first page, then the second. The color leaves her face from the top down.

“This is a deed,” she says. “Recorded in April. Cape Girardeau County.” She looks up at Curtis. “Grantee, June Ellen Haskins.”

“That’s not possible.” Curtis grabs the paper. “Mom doesn’t have a lawyer. Mom doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Mom goes to church every Wednesday,” I say. “Pastor Dale drives me. One Wednesday in April, he drove me to Raymond Beale’s office instead.”

Here is what my son didn’t know. After that phone call in March, I called my daughter. I hadn’t heard her voice in a long time, because Curtis told me she wanted nothing to do with us. She’d been writing me every Christmas. The cards went to Curtis’s address after he “helped” me forward my mail. Junie found out I’d never gotten a single one, and she cried so hard on the phone I had to sit down on the dryer.

Then she said, “Mama, tell me what you need.”

So I sold her the house. She paid a fair price, out of savings she’d been building for twenty years, and the money sits in an account with my name only. Mr. Beale wrote it so I keep a life estate, which means I live in this house until the day I die and nobody can move me out of it. Not a son, not a judge, not a van from Maple Crest.

“She’s confused,” Shawna says, fast. “She didn’t understand what she signed. We’ll take it to court.”

Junie pulls one more paper out of the envelope. “Capacity evaluation, done two days before the closing by Dr. Priscilla Varga. Mom passed every section. The doctor wrote that she was ‘sharp and clearly aware of her circumstances.’ Mr. Beale insisted on it. He said this exact conversation would happen someday.”

Curtis sits down hard in Ansel’s chair. “Mom. Why would you do this to me?”

That’s when I get up and go to my laundry room. I come back with the hymnal, open it, and take out the paper I’ve kept there since last fall. It’s a pawn ticket from a shop on Broadway. One men’s Hamilton watch, gold band, engraved on the back. Ansel’s watch. The one Curtis swore Junie stole off the nightstand in hospice.

I found the ticket in Curtis’s jacket pocket. I do the laundry in this house, after all. I sleep next to the washing machine.

“You told everyone your sister was a thief,” I say. “You let your father die thinking his daughter robbed him. You took $147 from me every month, and I wrote down every one of them.”

Junie lays the list on the table. Twenty-two months, in my handwriting.

The doorbell rings again. This time it is the realtor, a young man with a clipboard and a nice tie. Junie opens the door before Curtis can stand up.

“I’m sorry you drove out here,” she says kindly. “The owner isn’t selling.”

He looks at the deed, then at Curtis, and he leaves without a word.

Mr. Beale’s letter gives Curtis and Shawna thirty days to move out. It also says that if the money isn’t paid back by the end of the year, a report goes to Adult Protective Services. Shawna cries. Curtis doesn’t cry. He stares at the pawn ticket like it’s the only thing on the table.

They leave on a Tuesday. I sleep in my own bedroom that night, on Ansel’s side, and my back doesn’t hurt for the first time in a year and a half.

Three weeks later, Curtis comes back alone. He doesn’t knock. He sits on the back steps that Ansel and I poured in 1991 and puts his face in his hands. When I go out there, he’s holding the watch. He bought it back.

He gives it to Junie, not to me. He doesn’t say sorry, but he can’t look at her either.

I don’t know what my son will be in five years. I know what I’ll be. I’ll be in my own kitchen, in my own house, drinking my tea. My daughter will be across the table, because she finally got to come home too.