The name on the signature line was Frances.
Mine.
Celia had walked into my mothers branch at 9:14 on the morning of the funeral, with Moms checkbook and Moms death certificate and a story about being the daughter who handled things, and when the young teller explained that the account was in trust for Frances and only Frances could make a withdrawal, Celia had said, I am Frances.
And she signed my name. In my mothers bank. Two hours before we buried her.
The teller was new. She did not know Mom. She did not know me. She looked at a drivers license that Celia had in her purse, which was Moms license, and she looked at a woman in a black dress who was crying, and she did what a kind young person does.
The manager had found it on Monday when she went through the account, because she had known my mother for thirty years and she knew my mother had two daughters and only one of them came in on Thursdays.
Celia did not answer the question. She picked up her purse. The restaurant on Transit Road has one door, and she went out of it, and her friends from Williamsville sat looking at their mimosas like they had been served something that had turned.
She had taken the rosary out of our mothers hands because she said I did not go to church, and then she had gone to the bank and signed my name.
I will tell you what the bank did, because people should know. They made it right. A withdrawal taken by someone who signs another persons name is a forgery, and the bank is responsible for its own tellers, and the nine thousand dollars was back in my account within ten days. The manager drove the deposit slip to my house herself. She also closed the account and opened a new one so that nobody with Moms old checkbook could touch it, and she sat at my kitchen table while I signed, and she said my mother had told her, in October, that she wanted it this way because Frances was the one who would never ask.
Then the bank did what banks do. They filed a report. The district attorney took it from there, and I did not have to do a thing except tell the truth to a polite young man with a notebook.
Celia was charged with forgery and with grand larceny. She pleaded to the forgery. She paid the bank back, which means she paid me back, and she has a record, and she has three years of probation, and she is not allowed to be the executor of anything.
The Buick came back on a flatbed. The keys came back in an envelope with no note. The checkbook I burned in the sink.
The rosary came back last.
Celia mailed it. No letter. Just the blue glass beads in a padded envelope, with her return address in Williamsville on the corner, like she wanted me to know it was from her but could not write the words. The cross was bent a little where somebody had held it too tight.
I had it fixed at the jeweler on Seneca Street. Then I took it to Saturday Mass, because of my knees, and I said the whole thing through for my mother, and for the new teller who had been crying at her window when I went in to sign, and for Celia, which was the hardest part and the part Mom would have wanted most.
It is in the recipe box now. Under the index cards for pierogi and placek, next to the bank letter. The one place my mother knew I would look.