PART 3 — THE TAPE
On the screen, Mom sat in her pink robe in that same chair and looked right into the camera. Curtis, baby, she said, if you are watching this, it means you finally asked where the money went. So let me tell you about the phone call I got from the bank.
The whole living room went silent. Curtis uncrossed his arms.
In the winter before she died, Mom went on, the bank had called her about strange withdrawals. Someone had been moving money out of her account. It was not me, the daughter who bathed her and fed her and drove her to every appointment. It was Curtis, quietly, from Dallas, with the online access he had set up years before, certain no one would ever check.
The brother who stood up in front of forty relatives and called me a thief had been the one draining our mothers savings the whole time.
Mom knew. She found out from the bank, and instead of fighting her own son, she did something harder. She sat down in front of a camcorder and recorded the truth, so that if he ever turned on me, her voice would still be there to defend me.
She looked into the lens and named the dates, the amounts, the account. Then she said the thing that broke me. Darlene gave up four years of her life to care for me, and she never took a penny. Whatever is left is hers, and I will not have my daughter called a thief for the sins of my son.
Curtis sat in Moms chair with twenty-two relatives watching, and he could not say a word.
I did not have to defend myself. My mother did it for me, from beyond the grave, in her pink robe, on an old camcorder.
Aunt Rhonda crossed the room and hugged me, and one by one, the family that had looked away at the reunion came and stood on my side.
The money was handled the right way, through the bank and the proper people, and what Mom left was set right. Curtis is not welcome at the reunion anymore. He excused himself from that, the day he picked up a bank statement and lied about whose hands the money passed through.
Pay it back or never come to another family event, he had told me. In the end, those were the terms the family set for him.