The video came back to life on the laptop in the lawyer office with a little jump, and the face of my mother filled the screen again, thin and pale and smiling in her blue robe. “This next part is for you, Debbie,” she said, and I put my hand over my mouth. I am Deborah Sinclair, fifty eight years old, sitting in a conference room in Charleston with my sister Pam on the other side of the table. Pam had gone white as paper. She had stopped the video herself, six minutes earlier, with her finger on the key, at exactly this sentence.
“Debbie,” said Opal Hartsook from the screen, “you will be wondering where my rings went, and the checkbook, and the silver. I know where they went, because I followed them. I hired a man named Mr. Teller, who finds things. He has the tickets from three pawn shops in Dunbar and Nitro. Pam pawned my wedding ring in March, and the rest of it all summer. She was not herself. I was not angry, only sad. I want those things returned, and I want my girls whole.”
Pam, who was fifty five, sat with her hands clamped between her knees and tears dripping onto her skirt. In the corner, a lean quiet man in a brown suit, with a folder under his arm, nodded slowly toward me. That was Mr. Teller. He had been sitting there the whole hour, and I had thought him a clerk, because he took no notes and drank no water and kept his eyes on the carpet like a man at a wake. My mother went on, in the soft cadence she used to read to us on the back porch. She told me where the pawn tickets were. She told me what the estate was worth. And she told me about the trust.
A video that froze on a laptop gave one older sister the morning to bring her younger sister back to her in Charleston.
I gave my terms as the video ended and the lawyer closed the lid. “Pam, the rings are on the table, and the checkbook, and the silver. Mr. Teller redeemed every item with the money of Mama. I am not going to be angry with you. I will do what she asked. The estate, one million, six hundred thousand dollars, goes into a trust, and the trust pays for your treatment, at the best place we can find, for as long as it takes. You will go to the clinic in Huntington on Monday. I will drive you myself, and I will not leave until you are inside.”
Pam looked up and her face crumpled. “Debbie, I started with the pills after Jeff left. Then I could not stop, and then Mama got sick, and I was so afraid of what you would think. I took her ring from the dresser when she was asleep, and I stood in the pawn shop and wanted to vanish. I could not look at her.” I came around the table and knelt on the carpet in front of her chair. “She knew,” I said. “She watched you do it, and she still loved you more than anything on this earth.”
Then the old panic took her. Pam snatched the brown envelope that held the pawn tickets and the papers of the trust, leaped up, and bolted for the door of the conference room, with her purse swinging from her elbow. She got the door open. In the hallway stood Mr. Teller, who had somehow moved there without a sound, filling the frame with his lean brown shoulders. He did not touch her. He held out one palm, politely, as a man might at a crosswalk, and said, “Miss Pamela, I believe that belongs to your sister.”
Pam stopped, shaking. The envelope slid from her fingers into his hand, and he passed it back to me without looking at it. She leaned against the doorframe and sobbed like a child. I went to her, and she turned into my arms, and we stood in that bare hallway under the fluorescent lights, two gray haired women holding each other up. The lawyer closed his briefcase quietly and went to get a box of tissues, and I heard him pause outside the door to blow his own nose. Through the glass I could see the dome of the capitol shining gold in the late sun, as it had on the day we were both baptized, a lifetime ago. Mr. Teller found something very interesting to read on the water cooler.
The money consequences were arranged by the lawyer and signed that afternoon. The estate, one million, six hundred thousand dollars, went to a trust that paid for treatment first, then rent, then a small monthly sum for each of us. The house on the river was sold, and the money was divided equally. The wedding ring of our mother I put on the hand of Pam myself, in the parking lot, and she cried again, and the checkbook went into the shredder.
In the name of my mother Opal Hartsook, who passed in the spring, I started the Opal Hartsook Fund. It pays for treatment for people who became dependent on pain medicine and for hospice help for families, in Kanawha, Putnam and Boone counties. In the first year we placed thirty seven people in treatment and helped nineteen families care for a parent at home. One was a coal miner widow from Boone County who sat in my office with her hands folded and asked only for someone to stay with her at night.
On a Sunday in May, Pam, fourteen months well, drove up from Huntington in her little blue car with a pot of purple pansies. We planted them together along the porch rail of the old house of our mother, which the new owners had let us visit. The Kanawha River slid by, brown and slow, under a pale sky. Pam wore the ring on her right hand. When she caught me looking, she held it up to the light, and the stone flashed, and she did not look away.