Mom turned the last page of the blue folder and read the first line of her own lawyers letter out loud, and Darrens smile was long gone.
The letter said that as of two weeks ago my mother had revoked Darrens power of attorney and retained counsel to recover the sixty eight thousand dollars he had taken from a woman who worked thirty one years for the post office so she would never be a burden on her children.
I was not supposed to find out. I lived four hours away and I trusted my brother, who moved fast after Moms fall, got her to sign a power of attorney, and told me he would handle everything because I had enough on my plate. Eighteen months later I drove down to surprise her and found a For Sale sign in her yard and my mother in a shared Medicaid room at Pine Hollow, wearing a sweater that was not hers.
Darren had a new above ground pool and a bass boat and photos of both. Care is expensive, he told me. Mind your own business. I am her power of attorney.
My husband told me not to start a war with my brother, that Mom was confused anyway and would not even know. So I stopped asking questions. But I started visiting every Sunday, four hours each way, and every Sunday my mother asked me to bring her one thing. A notepad.
Every Sunday I requested one month of her bank statements, and I read them to her, and she wrote down what I read, in her own hand, in a blue folder she kept under her mattress where Darren never thought to look.
Four thousand dollars to Lakeside Pools. Twenty two thousand to Bass Pro Boats. Eleven thousand five hundred to Caesars Atlantic City. A years worth of Sundays, in a post office retirees careful handwriting, matching every statement to every toy Darren bought himself.
A power of attorney is not a license to steal. It is a duty, the strictest kind the law knows, and a man who uses his mothers pension for a bass boat has not misunderstood his duty. He has violated it, and that violation has a name, and the name is financial exploitation of an elder.
My mother is not confused. She never was. She stood up out of her wheelchair at her own eightieth birthday, in front of twenty relatives, and read her lawyers letter in a steady voice, and revoked the power of her son with the same hand that sorted mail for thirty one years.
The lawyer, and then the state, and then a prosecutor, followed the blue folder. It is very hard to argue with a victim who documented every theft herself, month by month, with her daughter reading and her own hand writing it down.
What could be recovered is being recovered. The pool and the boat sell for a good deal when a court orders it, and a house that was sold out from under an elder can be unwound more than Darren ever imagined. My mother will not get all sixty eight thousand back, but she will get enough, and she will get out of Pine Hollow.
She is in a real room now. Her own room, her own things, the sweater that is actually hers. I moved her closer to me, and the Sundays are shorter now, and she does not need a notepad anymore, though she keeps the blue folder on her shelf like a trophy, which it is.
My husband does not tell me not to start wars anymore. He watched a woman stand up out of a wheelchair and win one with a notepad.
So I am never a burden on my kids, my mother always said about her pension. Her son tried to make her one anyway, and her daughter read her the statements, and in the end it was Darren who became the burden, to a court, which is exactly where that kind of son belongs.