Part 3 — The Deposit
Elmer slid the last page across the table, and I read the line at the bottom three times before I understood it.
“Hope Ridge Recovery Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Deposit paid in full: $9,400. Bed reserved. Admit date: open.”
I sat down hard on a folding chair. The fellowship hall was so quiet I could hear the coffee urn tick.
Shana looked at the floor. Her whole body was shaking.
“I did it in March,” she whispered. “The same week you found out. I put it on your card because I was out of everything and it was the only thing I could think of. I was going to go. I was going to fix it before you ever saw the bill.”
My sister put her hand over her mouth. Elmer set the shoebox down very gently.
My daughter had stolen my name to pay for the one thing that might save her, and had been too ashamed to walk through the door.
I stood up and walked around the table. I did not say a word about the credit cards. I took her by both hands in front of the whole church, the way you take hold of a child who has come in out of the rain.
“The bed is still there?”
“They said ninety days.” She cried openly now. “That was ninety days ago.”
Elmer, who had carried mail for thirty-one years and knew how things travel, made a call from the church office. He came back and said that Hope Ridge had held the bed because a counselor there remembered her voice.
We drove to Tulsa the following morning in my Buick, Shana in the passenger seat with a paper bag of clothes. Her boys stayed with me. At the door she asked me to forgive her. I said I already had.
The credit cards were another matter, but not a hard one. I filed an identity theft affidavit with the Federal Trade Commission and the three credit bureaus. The eleven accounts were removed, and the thirty-eight thousand dollars was written off as fraud, because I had never signed a thing.
The post office form with the little heart went into a folder for the day Shana asked to see it. Elmer wrote on the cover, in his careful hand, “To be burned together.”
In June she completed the ninety days. I drove up for the family day and brought both boys.
She walked out the front door holding a medallion, and the youngest one yelled, “Mama!” loud enough for the whole parking lot.