In the back seat of the car, where I had been sitting on the way up from Branson, was my daughter. Kim had slipped into my place at the last second, with her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking, and as I watched through the plate glass of the truck stop, the car backed out of its space with her still inside. Brett had not looked back. He had not noticed. He had simply seen the police cruiser pulling in at the pumps, and he had put his foot down and gone, and he had taken my crying daughter with him.
I stood at the register of the Love truck stop in Joplin with my knees knocking and my hands wrapped around the strap of the new purse. The woman behind the counter, a wide kind person named Pearl, had already called the police. She came around and put an arm around my shoulders. She said, “Honey, sit down in my chair.” I said I preferred to stand, because I had a feeling. Two officers came through the door, a man and a woman, and I told them everything I had heard through the door at two in the morning.
The female officer wrote it down in a spiral notebook, and her pencil never stopped. When I came to the part about the power of attorney, she looked up at her partner. He nodded. He said that the Joplin police had a friend at the Kansas Bureau, and that a call would be made at once. I gave them the license plate of the car, which I had memorized on the way down out of old habit. They put out a notice before I had finished my tea. It was almost one thirty.
A mother who spent thirty five years remembering every child in a school can remember the license plate of the car that tried to forget her.
They found Brett at the Kansas line, at a gas station in Baxter Springs, filling the tank with a nervous smile. Kim was still in the back seat. The trooper who approached the window said that she was crying so hard she could not speak, and that when he asked if she wished to say anything, she shook her head and held out her cell phone. On the screen was a message she had been typing to me, unsent, for thirty miles. It said, Mom, I am so sorry, I never wanted to.
They brought Kim back to Joplin that evening in the back of a patrol car, not in handcuffs, but with a woman officer beside her. I waited in a small room at the police station with a cup of cocoa that Pearl had sent over. When the door opened, I stood up, and Kim stopped in the doorway. She was fifty one years old and looked like she was nine, with her mascara running and her blouse wrinkled. She said, in a thin voice, “Mama, I am sorry.”
I did not hug her at first. I sat down again, and I told her to sit across from me. I said that I would listen, and that I wanted every word. And she told me, in the plain bare voice that people use when everything else has been stripped away. She and Brett had been drowning in debt for four years, ever since his job at the lumberyard ended. They had borrowed on credit cards. They had taken out a loan on the house. And one night, Brett had said the word dementia, and it had grown.
“I kept thinking you would never know,” she whispered. “I kept thinking, she is old, she is lonely, she will just go to a nice place and be taken care of. I told myself it was a kindness.” She stopped and covered her mouth. “At the breakfast buffet, I buttered your toast, and I almost told you. I almost told you at the table. And I could not, Mama. I was so ashamed.” I said I knew. I said I had watched her do it. And I said that I had let her, because I loved her.
Brett Voth was charged with attempted exploitation of an elder, conspiracy, and kidnapping, and in January the court sentenced him to eight years. Kim cooperated, gave a full statement, and gave up all claim to my house and my accounts. The judge, a gray haired woman with a gentle voice, gave her three years of probation and ordered her to counseling. She said, from the bench, that she had never seen an adult child so thoroughly ashamed. She told Kim that shame was a start, but only a start.
I took Kim home to Salina myself, in the front seat of my own car. We did not speak for the first hundred miles. At the Abilene exit, she began to cry quietly, and I handed her a Kleenex without looking. At the house I built with Harold in 1971, she sat down in the kitchen where she had done her homework as a girl, and I put the kettle on. I said that she could stay as long as she needed, and that the house would remain mine until I went to join her father.
It was a year before Kim could look me in the eye. I did not push. We took slow walks in the evening, and she began to help me in the garden. In October, one year to the day after Branson, we drove back to the same motel on the Strip. We stood in the parking lot in a cold wind. Kim reached into her purse and took out a folded paper. It was a copy of the deed to my house, signed over to me, again, in her handwriting. She laid it in my hand. “I never want to forget,” she said.