The passbook had been kept in the back of the glove compartment of the car of my late mother, under a roadmap and a bag of butterscotch candies, and it was the only thing in the whole vehicle that Bob had not already searched. I opened it on the kitchen table in the house of my sister, with a pot of tea cooling beside me and my sister Mildred standing at my shoulder. The first page was stamped with the name of a small bank in Galveston, and under it, in a neat typed line, was the name of the beneficiary. Janice Marie Dorsey. That was me.
I turned the pages slowly. The account had been opened in 1999. Every month for twenty five years, an amount had been deposited, sometimes fifty dollars, sometimes two hundred, always in the careful hand of the teller. Mother had never mentioned it, not once, in all her long life. The balance on the last line was ninety eight thousand dollars. I sat there with my mouth open. Mildred let out a small, strangled noise and reached for the back of a chair.
“Bob told us she had nothing,” she whispered. “He said her savings were gone. He said he was paying her bills.” I nodded. I had believed him. My older brother had managed the money of our mother for the last six years of her life, and when she died in March, he had looked us in the eye and said there was nothing left but debts. He had even asked me to chip in for the funeral. I had done it, with a check for fifteen hundred dollars.
A family can lose a mother in a day and lose each other over the years that follow, if one of them is allowed to hold the keys to the safe.
The next part was harder. In the back of the passbook, folded in quarters, lay a statement from the pension office, showing that our mother had received fifteen hundred dollars a month from a union fund, deposited each month into an account that Bob controlled. For six years, he had told her that the money was needed for her care, which was provided in her own home by a neighbor. The neighbor, we learned later, had been paid forty dollars a week. The rest had gone into a boat.
Mildred drove with me to the house of Bob the next morning. She did the talking, which surprised me, because she was the quiet one. Bob answered the door in his bathrobe with a coffee mug in his hand. He saw the passbook in my fingers, and his face did a complicated thing. He tried to smile. Then he let us in, and he sat at his own dining table with the boat catalog still open in front of him, and I laid the statement on top of it.
“I was going to pay it back,” he said. He said it fast, before either of us could speak. “I was always going to pay it back. The boat was an investment. I was going to sell it and put everything in the account.” Mildred said, in a voice I had never heard from her, that he had not been investing. He had been taking from a woman who could not ask. Bob opened his mouth and closed it again. For a long moment, he looked like our father, in the last week of his life.
Mildred sided with me completely. She said it plainly, to his face, and I loved her for it. She said that the passbook belonged to me by right, that the pension money was owed to the estate, and that she would stand beside me in any court in Texas. Bob put his head in his hands. He said he was ashamed. He said he had been drowning in loans for a long time. And then, in a muffled voice, he said, “Tell me what to do, Janice.”
I told him. He would sell the boat, which was worth about sixty thousand. He would repay the pension money, in full, to the estate, over three years, with the amount split between Mildred and me. He would also return my fifteen hundred dollars for the funeral, with a written apology. I put all of it in a letter and read it to him, and he signed it with the pen from his shirt pocket. His hand shook. I watched him do it, and I did not feel triumph. I felt sad.
He sold the boat within a month, to a man from Corpus Christi. On the day it left the harbor on a trailer, he stood on the dock with his arms hanging at his sides and watched it go. Then he did something I did not expect. He called me and asked if I would like to take a real cruise, with Mildred, on him. A real ship, with a dining room and a band. He said he wanted to give us something that was not borrowed.
We sailed from Galveston in April, the three of us, on a white ship with a hundred flags. On the first night, the three of us stood at the rail and watched the lights of the shore slide away. Mildred held the passbook in her purse. Bob stood between us, with his eyes on the water. At one point he took my hand and the hand of Mildred, and we stayed that way for a very long time. Nobody said anything. We were finally even, and the sea was quiet.