She folded her hands and looked her brother dead in the eye. Then my daughter said, “Grant, you did Mama’s taxes for eleven years. Whose name is on the medical expenses?”
He said hers, obviously, they were her expenses.
Faith said, “Whose money?”
My son is a CPA at a firm with a name on a building and he sat at my table and could not answer a question about a return he prepared and signed.
Here is what was on those returns, because Faith brought copies, and here is why she brought them, which is not the reason you would think.
The adult day program, three days a week, 2013 through 2016. The bath chair and the transfer bench. The mileage, which Grant himself entered at the standard medical rate, sixty-one hundred miles in 2015 alone, because his sister drove our mother to Little Rock and back for the eye injections every three weeks for four years.
All of it deducted. All of it correct. Grant did the arithmetic on his own sister’s life for eleven years and never once asked who was writing those checks.
It was Faith. Out of a chair rental in a strip mall shop. Sixty-one thousand dollars across those years by her count, and she has never asked anybody for a dime of it and did not ask that night either.
The reason she brought the copies is that she found something in them.
On the 2016 return, in the file Grant gave Mama, there is a sticky note in Mama’s handwriting stuck to the medical schedule. Mama saw that page every spring. Mama knew what those numbers were even if her son did not.
Faith Ann — I have watched this number go up every year and I have never once been able to make you take money. So I am writing it here on the page where it lives, and you will find it when you are cleaning out my papers, which we both know is a job that is going to be yours too. It was never nothing. I saw all of it.
Faith did not know that note was there until October, when she finally got to the file boxes, eight months after we buried her.
She read it out at my table with her voice going and her hands still folded and she did not cry until the end.
Then she said, “You can call me a babysitter who cuts hair. Mama knew what I was. That is honestly enough for me. But I am not getting up to do these dishes tonight.”
Nobody did them for a while. Then Grant did them, badly, alone, and his wife dried.
He came back in December with a folder. He had gone through all eleven years and amended nothing, because there was nothing to amend, and instead he had worked out what Faith had spent and set up an account in her name and put the whole of it in there over eighteen months, and he did it without telling anybody, and I only know because the bank called the house by mistake.
She tried to give it back. He told her it was not a gift, it was a correction, and that he was a man who corrects things for a living.
And I quit letting it ride. Nineteen years I let my girl get up from my table, and her mother saw it, and I did not.