I picked my pencil up off the floor and wrote the name on my legal pad in block letters. Jeffrey T. Harmon, Preparer. Registered with the Internal Revenue Service in 2021, and signing every return for the Kindred Hearts Lifestyle LLC under his own license number, with my Social Security number at the top. Ms. Reyes read the dates aloud, and I wrote them down. She told me gently that my son had prepared three years of returns. She said that the identity of the owner had never been questioned, because the preparer was a family member who had attested to the identity of the owner in person.
I thanked her. I hung up the telephone. Then I sat at my kitchen table in the white Cape Cod in Georgetown and did what a bookkeeper does when the numbers do not balance. I did not cry. I made a cup of tea. I took a fresh yellow legal pad and ruled it in columns. I wrote down every payment, every date, every document that had my name on it. By five o clock I had a ledger that would have made my supervisor at the Toyota plant proud. At the bottom I wrote one line. Jeffrey did not do this alone. Jeffrey cannot add.
I called him that evening. He answered on the fourth ring, in a hushed voice, from some other room. I asked him one question. “Jeffrey, did you know that you signed your mother name to a business?” There was a long silence, and in it I heard the sound of my son breathing. “Mama,” he said, “Kendra said it was just a formality. She said you knew about it, and that you said yes. I did not look.” I said, “I will see you and Kendra and the children on Saturday. I am having a belated Easter. Bring the baskets.”
An IRS installment letter and a bookkeeper legal pad gave one retired Toyota clerk the length of a single Easter to bring her son back to the truth in Georgetown.
I gave my terms to Jeffrey over the telephone. They would come at noon on Saturday. I would cook the ham that was not eaten at Easter and I would hide forty eggs in the yard for the grandchildren. After the egg hunt, I would sit them both down at my kitchen table, and Jeffrey would tell me what he knew, and Kendra would tell me the rest. There would be no yelling. A bookkeeper does not yell. I told him that if he wished to repair what had been broken, he could start by walking into my house with his head up.
They came at noon. Kendra wore a pale yellow sundress and a smile she had practiced in the car. The children ran past me into the yard with their baskets, shouting for the dogwood. I seated Kendra and Jeffrey at my kitchen table and laid the legal pad between them. Kendra read the ledger. Her smile slid, a little at a time, off her face. “Bettie, you have misunderstood,” she said. “The business was in your name for liability. It was a favor.” I said, “Kendra, you used my Social Security number to hide a hundred and ninety thousand dollars of income, and you used my check to pay the first of the taxes.”
Kendra did not weep. She stood up so quickly that her chair tipped. She snatched the legal pad and the three IRS letters from the table, meaning to run through the back door and across the yard to her SUV, and drive away, and say that an old woman was confused. She yanked open the screen and plunged down the steps into the bright afternoon. And the yard, that day, was covered from the porch to the dogwood with forty plastic eggs, pink and blue and yellow and green, scattered in the grass like a field of strange flowers.
She took three steps and her white sandal came down on a pink egg. It rolled. She went up in the air with her arms flung wide, and the legal pad went one way and the IRS letters went the other, and she came down on her back in the middle of the grass, in her yellow sundress, with eggs bursting open all around her. Jelly beans flew. A chocolate bunny skittered under the dogwood. Mia, aged ten, who had been counting her eggs, put her hand over her mouth. Luke, aged eight, cried out joyfully, “Mom found the golden egg!”
Kendra lay in the grass and looked at the sky and began, helplessly, to laugh. And then, for the first time in a very long while, she told the truth. She said she had been so afraid of being poor that she had stopped being honest. She said that every dollar she posted online was a dollar she did not have, and that the business was a story she told to keep her life afloat. Jeffrey knelt beside her. “Bettie,” he said, “I am so sorry.” I said I knew. I said that I would call the IRS in the morning and file the forms for identity theft myself.
In the name of Roy, who passed in 2019, I started the Roy Harmon Fund. It pays for free tax preparation, identity theft recovery and bookkeeping help, done by retired accountants and volunteer bookkeepers, for older adults who have been misused by someone they trusted, in Scott, Fayette and Woodford counties. In the first year, our volunteers helped three hundred forty seniors. One widow in Paris, Kentucky, wept in my office when she saw that her balance had been corrected to the penny. I told her that was the whole job.
On Easter morning this year, I sat at the head of my own table, in my lavender dress and my pearl clip on earrings, with Jeffrey at my right hand and Kendra at my left. The kids said grace. After the ham, they hunted for the eggs in my yard, and they found every one of them. Kendra helped. She did not take a single photograph. When Mia held up a golden egg, I let out a laugh that startled the birds. I smelled my Jergens lotion. It smelled like nothing but home.