I read the letter all the way to the end, slowly, the way I read every return that comes across my desk. Then I set it down and looked at my son.
“Greg,” I said. “Why was this number on my refrigerator?”
He rubbed his face with both hands. “Shelly wrote it down when we were at your house in September. She wanted to see if your savings would cover it.”
The office was so quiet I could hear the clock over the door.
“So the power of attorney,” I said. “It was never about my memory.”
“No.” He couldn’t look at me. “It was about your money. We were going to pay the IRS out of your savings and tell you later. Shelly said you would never notice. She said you were getting forgetful.”
“I notice everything,” I said. “I have noticed everything for sixty-nine years.”
“I know.” His voice broke. “That is why I am here. I could not go through with it. And the letter says if I don’t call them by the end of the month, they start taking it out of the business account. I would lose the trucks. I would lose everything.”
I looked at the shoebox on the floor. Three years of receipts. Gas, mulch, mower blades, a hundred little slips of paper my son had thrown in a box because he was too busy or too scared to deal with them.
“Did you ever file at all?” I asked.
“The first year. Then I got behind, and then I was afraid to look.”
I took off Harold’s glasses and cleaned them on my blouse, the way he used to.
“All right,” I said. “Pick up that box and put it on my desk.”
He stared at me. “Mom?”
“You heard me. And go next door and get us two coffees. This is going to take a while.”
We stayed in that office until almost midnight. I sorted every receipt into piles. Fuel. Equipment. Repairs. Supplies. Greg read the numbers off to me, and I added them up on my calculator, the old one with the paper roll.
By eleven o’clock, I knew what I needed to know. The IRS had estimated his taxes because he never sent them anything. They had no idea about his expenses. Every mower blade, every gallon of gas, every truck repair was missing.
“Greg,” I said. “They think you made a lot more money than you did.”
He just looked at me.
The next week, Ray let me use the office after hours. I filed all three missing returns properly, with every deduction my son was entitled to. I wrote a letter to the IRS explaining everything and asking for the penalties to be reduced, since it was his first time.
Six weeks later, a new letter came. Greg brought it straight to the office, still sealed. He wanted me to open it.
The new total was a little over six thousand dollars. With a payment plan of one hundred and eighty dollars a month.
Greg sat down in the client chair and cried like a little boy.
He pays it himself, every month, from his own business account. I didn’t give him a penny. He never asked again.
Shelly came to see me in March. She stood in the doorway of the office with a plate of cookies and couldn’t get the words out at first. Finally she said, “Norma, I said terrible things about you. You saved us anyway.”
“I didn’t save you,” I said. “I just added it up.”
The power of attorney form is still in my purse. I keep it there to remind myself of something Harold used to say. Never sign anything you haven’t read, and never let anybody tell you that you can’t.
Ray asked me to come back next tax season. Four days a week this time. Twenty dollars an hour.
And every April, Greg brings me his shoebox. Sorted now, in envelopes, labeled in his own handwriting.