Part 3 — The Amount Typed In
The number typed on the line marked AMOUNT was two hundred and ten thousand dollars. Every cent of what Dot and I saved in fifty-one years, in a form I had never seen, with my name already printed underneath it.
Lester put his hand on my shoulder and said, in a very calm voice, Howard, sit down. Then he stepped between me and the table, picked up the clipboard like it was a casserole, and said to Mr. Grady, Sir, I think we will wait for the police.
I had already texted my daughter from the pharmacy, and she had called the Port St. Lucie police before Lester even started the car. Two officers arrived four minutes after Tasha spoke to me in the hallway. They asked everyone in the kitchen to stay where they were.
Mr. Grady was a notary whose license had been revoked in another county. He gave his full statement on the spot, said he was paid cash to stamp whatever Tasha handed him, and handed over a stack of blank forms in his briefcase with other seniors names already typed in.
The white powder in the jar was tested that same week. It was a crushed prescription sedative mixed through the sugar, the kind my doctor had never ordered for me. It explained the afternoon naps, the dry mouth, and the glasses on the floor.
Dots missing pills were no mystery after that. Tasha had been taking them from the bottle for months, to sell and to crush. The count I made on the bathroom counter, fourteen of ninety, was the exact number she had not gotten to yet.
She was charged with exploitation of an elderly person, forgery, and administering medication without authority. Mr. Grady was charged with fraudulent notarization and conspiracy. The agency that sent Tasha cooperated completely and gave the police her whole file, including three earlier complaints it had failed to follow up.
The bank restored my two checks to the penny, and froze the account she had been preparing to empty. A man who counts his wifes pills one by one is never really as helpless as the people around him think.
A doctor checked me over and found nothing lasting. I stayed awake all afternoon within a week, and within a month I walked to the end of the street without my cane. My daughter flew in from Atlanta and stayed three weeks, and she cried at the sink every day, and I let her.
The agency paid for a replacement aide of my choosing, and I picked a retired nurse named Mrs. Odom who is sixty-eight and tells me what is in every cup before I drink it. She also drinks it first, which I never asked her to do, and which I never forgot.
The police let me keep Dots ring. It sits back on her dresser, in the dish, where it belongs. Anita at the pharmacy comes by on Sundays and checks the cabinet with me, and we throw away the old bottles together, one at a time.
The last thing I did was clean out that cupboard myself, and I put a plain bag of store-bought sugar on the shelf. Honest, white, and ordinary, just like Dot would have wanted it.