The name on the pharmacy receipt was Dustin Rudd, and I had typed it into court records at least a dozen times. He was the older son of Shawna, the wife of my brother, a pale and soft spoken young man with a ponytail and a long history of forged prescriptions. I sat in my car on West Broadway with the heater running and a plastic bag of the heart pills of my mother in my lap, and I thought, calmly, as a stenographer thinks, that I was looking at the transcript of a crime. Then I put the car in gear and drove straight to the Pettis County sheriff.
The sheriff was a woman named Carla Dunn, whom I had known for twenty years across the aisles of the courthouse. She listened to me in her office for twenty minutes, with the flip phone on her desk and its forty three drafts glowing on the screen, one at a time. She did not interrupt. When she reached the last one, the one that broke off in the middle of the word, she took off her reading glasses and pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Patty,” she said. “I am so sorry. I am going to ask you to be very brave for the next few weeks.”
The investigation was quiet. A judge signed an order for the exhumation of my mother, and I sat in the car on the day of it, parked on the gravel road outside the cemetery with my hands in my lap. They did not let me watch. A detective stood beside me with a cup of coffee and said nothing. The laboratory in Jefferson City took eleven days. When Sheriff Dunn called me to her office on a gray Thursday, I knew from her face. Mama had died of an overdose of a sedative that was not her own.
The people who love us leave their voices in odd places, and sometimes it takes a fifty cent purchase to hear what they were trying to say.
The pills in the blue capsule, the ones that put my mother to sleep, had come from Kansas City. Dustin Rudd had obtained them with a prescription from a doctor who had lost his license in Kansas two years before, working out of a storefront office on Troost Avenue. The investigators found more than three hundred prescriptions written in the names of old people, filled by a handful of young men like Dustin, and sold by the dozen. The name of my mother was on four of them. Kevin had signed for two.
They arrested Shawna first, on a Monday morning, at the kitchen table of the house where my mother had been born. They arrested her sons next. Diesel, the pit bull, was taken to a shelter, and I confess that my heart went out to him, a dog who had done nothing but growl at the wrong people. Kevin was picked up last, at a fast food restaurant, where he had gone to avoid the squad cars. He did not run. He put his hands on the table and said, “It was me. Do not blame the boys. It was my mother, and it was me.”
I went to see him at the county jail on the second day. He sat across the glass from me in an orange uniform, gray and hollow, with the stubble of three days on his face. We had not spoken, really spoken, in two years. “Patty,” he said. “I did not mean for her to die. I swear to God. I owed sixty thousand dollars to a man from the casino in Kansas City, and Shawna said if we just kept Mama quiet for a while, the house would take care of everything.” His eyes were red. “I loved her. I did. I was just so scared.”
I thought of the forty three messages on the flip phone, misspelled and desperate, every one of them to me. I thought of the way she had typed Patty at the beginning of each, as though the name were a doorway. I looked at my brother through the scratched glass, and I could not say that I forgave him. I could not say that I hated him. What I said was, “Kevin, you are going to tell them everything. You are going to help them put away the people who did this to other mothers. That is the only way I can look at you.”
He did. He testified for the state for three days, in a borrowed suit, and the testimony took apart the entire operation. The doctor from Troost Avenue was sentenced to fifteen years. Shawna and Dustin received twelve and ten. Kevin pleaded to involuntary manslaughter and received a sentence of seven years, which the judge described, in a quiet voice, as lenient because of his cooperation and unfit because of what he had done. I sat in the second row with the flip phone in my coat pocket. When the judge finished, I closed my eyes.
I moved back into the house on West Broadway in the summer. I had the walls repainted yellow, as my mother had wanted for years, and I put the cookie jar shaped like a cow back on the counter, where it belongs. The big metal flour canister of her own mother sits beside it, with the lid on. I kept it full. On the first night in the house, I sat at the kitchen table with the flip phone and finally did the thing I had been unable to do. I opened the drafts, one at a time, and I pressed Send.
Forty three messages went to my own phone, in a row, over the course of a minute, and my phone buzzed forty three times on the table. I read them all again. Then I typed one back, on the little keys, as slowly as my mother would have. I wrote: Mama I got every one. I am here. I am home. I put the phone down and went to the stove, and I made her pancakes, the way she did on Saturdays. The kitchen filled with the smell of butter, and the yellow walls caught the evening sun, and for the first time in a long time I was not afraid of silence.