Behind the bank receipt was a second page on law office letterhead from Jackson, with my name typed on the first line, and a sentence that made my knees buckle. It named me as a beneficiary of a trust Miss Opal had set up a year before, signed and sealed and nothing Carter could wave away.
Carter took one step toward the bed, and the nurse stepped in front of him, and Miss Opal said the thing she had been holding.
Tammy dear, she whispered, the eighteen thousand dollars that saved your shop in 2019 was mine. I never wanted you to know. And the reason my nephew is so frightened of that word 2019 is that it was the same year he moved sixty thousand dollars of my money into his own accounts and thought a dying old woman would never notice.
The room went silent. Carter went the color of the bedsheet.
He had accused me of weaseling five dollars a week out of her, while the real theft was sitting in his own suit pocket.
Miss Opal had known for years. She had her lawyer document every dollar Carter took, and she had set her affairs so that what she wanted to give, she gave freely, to the people who had actually been kind to her. A hairdresser from a trailer off Highway 49 was one of them.
Carter did not have me charged with elder abuse. He had his own lawyers in Jackson to worry about after that, and none of them loved the work once they saw what Miss Opal had kept.
She passed that winter. She left me enough to buy the building my shop sits in, so no flood and no landlord could ever put me out again. I still do wash and set the way she liked it, on the two old ladies who still come in on Fridays, and I still think of her every time somebody folds a five-dollar bill in half.