My mother started hiding her purse. Every time I came to visit, she tucked it under a cushion, or behind her back, or down beside her in the recliner, and she did it even from me, her own daughter, which is what scared me. Mama is eighty-two, living at home with an aide we hired last year when she could not manage on her own. She was never a secretive woman a day in her life. Now she clutched that purse like somebody was going to snatch it, and she watched the doorway while she did it.
At first I chalked it up to her age, the way older folks get funny about their things. I almost let it go. But it was not just the purse. Her checkbook went missing from the drawer where she always kept it. A ring she had worn fifty years was not on her hand anymore, and when I asked, she got flustered and changed the subject. And the aide, the one we trusted, the one with the references, always seemed to be standing a little too close, always answering for Mama before Mama could speak.
I did not want to believe it. You hire someone to care for your mother, you want to believe they are an angel. But my mother was hiding her own purse in her own home, and a mother does not do that for nothing.
So when the aide stepped out to the pharmacy, I sat down beside Mama, took her hand, and asked her quietly why she was hiding her purse from everybody. She glanced at the door, checking that we were alone, and she whispered that the money kept going, a little at a time, and that she had caught the aide going through her things, and that when she said something the aide told her she was confused, that she was imagining it, that if she made trouble she would be put in a home.
My mother had been threatened into silence in her own house. She hid her purse because it was the last thing she still had any control over, and she did not tell me because that woman had convinced her nobody would believe an old lady over a nice young aide with references.
I believed her. Every word.
I did not make a scene. I got Mama out of that house and to my place that same afternoon. Then I called the bank, and the police, and the state licensing board. The statements told the whole story, months of it, small enough each time to miss and large enough all together to make me sick. The ring turned up at a pawn shop across town, on a receipt with the aide name on it. We got it back.
I kept thinking I was going crazy, because she kept telling me I was. I did not know how to prove it. I just held onto my purse and waited for you to notice.
I noticed, Mama. Late, but I noticed.
She lives with me now. The purse sits out in the open on the hall table, and she has not hidden it once. She does not have to guard it anymore. That is my job now, and I will not be careless with it again.