I pinned the thirty-year pin to my collar in the cemetery parking lot, with the engine running and the heat on my bad knee. My hands were shaking too much to get the clasp. It took four tries. A man in a cemetery jacket watched me through the sleet like I might be stealing the car I was sitting in.
Mom went into the ground at one. By a quarter to three I was in the front hall in Lake Forest, the house I hadn’t stood in since 2012, leaning on a cane I’d hated since April.
Sixty people in good shoes. Buyers, reps, neighbors. My father, 86, holding court by the piano.
He spotted me right away and said nothing. He waited for an audience. Three of his reps drifted close, and then he looked at the cane, then the pin, and said, “Still wiping strangers’ backsides for $20 an hour, Darla?”
He knew I was an RN. He’d known for fourteen years. The reps laughed on cue. William, my little brother, 62 and Dad’s sales director since he was 30, raised his bourbon at my collar and said pins must be easy to come by now. I told him you got one for thirty years of work, not for showing up. His wife Kristy brushed past me with the shrimp tray and never said a word, which she kept up for the rest of the afternoon like it was a job.
I had come for Mom only. Sixty-three years married to him, three weeks dying in a hospital bed, and I couldn’t visit because he’d put me down as NOT FAMILY.
Then Shante Pettway walked in. She runs the hospital system Dad had chased for six years. She went right past his hand, took mine, and thanked me for eleven nights with her daddy.
On the porch afterward she gave me Mom’s pill bottle with a note taped to the bottom.
The note had a date on it. Oct 11, 2012. The day the letter came.
The Cap With the Ridge
The rest of the strip was folded twice more, tight, the way Mom folded grocery receipts so they’d fit in the coin part of her wallet.
I opened it on the porch rail with sleet landing on it.
Her handwriting got smaller as it went. She always did that when she had more to say than paper.
Darla. I never signed that letter. He wrote “Mom” himself. He told me you said you wanted nothing more to do with us, that you’d said so on the phone to him. He told you I agreed with him. I believed him for too long. I’m sorry for every one of those years. Shante watched me sign the new trust. The house is yours. My half of the company and one more share is yours. I was not confused. Ask her. Love, Mom.
I read it twice. The second time I sat down on the porch swing, which you are not supposed to do with a new knee, and the knee told me so.
“She wrote it on the Thursday before she died,” Shante said. “Her lawyer came on the Friday. I was in the room for both.”
“She was lucid?”
“She beat me at the crossword. She did it in pen.”
That was Mom. She did everything in pen, including, apparently, getting even.
“He was there every day,” Shante said. “Two o’clock, every day. He’d take the bottle off the tray and count the pills into his palm. Then he’d tell the nurse the count, like he was reporting inventory. He never once turned it over.”
“He wouldn’t,” I said. “He doesn’t read labels. He sells them.”
Shante almost laughed. She didn’t, because it was a funeral, but her shoulders moved.
I held the bottle up. LUCILLE TOVAR. The cap with the little ridge that she said was made by a man who had never had arthritis. There were still pills inside. I shook it once out of habit and counted by sound. Maybe nine.
“Why didn’t she call me?”
“She asked him for your number,” Shante said. “He told her you’d changed it. She asked William. William said the same thing.”
That one went in under the ribs.
William had my number. William had texted me “happy birthday sis” every March for fourteen years, three words, never a phone call. I had thought that was the most he was allowed. I’d thought somebody in that house was sneaking me a crumb.
“She asked your brother twice,” Shante said. “I was there the second time.”
I put the note back in its folds. My thumbs did it without me.
For fourteen years I had believed my mother sat at that kitchen table and agreed to put her name under “don’t come home.” I’d believed it through two Christmases alone, one hip surgery on a patient’s daughter I handled better than my own grief, and the April knee, when I put “none” on the emergency contact line and the intake girl looked at me like I’d said I was raised by wolves.
Mom had believed I’d hung up on her for good.
He’d stood between us with a pen in each hand.
“I’m not here to tell you what to do,” Shante said. “I promised her two things. I’d put this in your hand, and I’d stand next to you if you went back in.”
“And if I just drive home?”
“Then I drink my coffee and go home too. And Tovar Medical never gets a purchase order from me while that man runs it. That part was my idea, not hers.”
The front door had a little oval window. Through it I could see the hallway, the umbrella stand Mom bought in Galena, and the back of my father’s head, nodding at someone. Working it. Already over it.
I wanted to throw the cane through that window. I’m 64. I’ve thought about throwing a lot of things through windows. I’ve never done it, because somebody always has to sweep up after, and it’s usually a nurse.
I stood up instead. It took three tries and the porch rail.
“Okay,” I said. “Stand next to me.”
The Piano
Inside it smelled like coffee, wet wool and the lilies from the church that somebody had brought home because you can’t throw out funeral lilies, it’s bad luck, or so says every aunt.
The room did the thing again when we came in. The talking dipped. Sixty people turning to look at the woman with the cane, and the woman they’d all been hoping would talk to them.
Dad was by the piano where William’s bourbon still sat. He saw Shante beside me and the smile came up on its own, like a garage door with a sensor.
“Shante. I hope my daughter hasn’t been bending your ear. She tells a story.”
“She hasn’t said a word,” Shante said. “Your wife did the talking.”
I walked to the piano. That’s eight steps on a good day. It was eleven. I counted, because everyone else was watching, and counting is what I do when people are watching me die slowly, which is my whole profession.
I set the pill bottle on the piano lid, next to William’s glass.
Dad looked at it and frowned, the way he frowns at a competitor’s catalog.
“Where did you get that? That’s hospital property.”
“It’s Mom’s,” I said. “Turn it over.”
He didn’t. He folded his arms. “I’m not playing games at my wife’s funeral, Darla.”
“Then I’ll read it,” I said, and I did.
I read it loud. I read it with sixty people listening and the sleet going on the windows like somebody tapping a pencil. He wrote “Mom” himself. I heard a woman by the fireplace say “oh” like she’d stepped on something.
When I finished, nobody moved. One of the reps from earlier, the young one with the shiny haircut, set his plate down very carefully on the arm of a chair.
Dad laughed.
It was a good laugh. He’s had eighty-six years to practice it.
“She was on morphine,” he said, to the room, not to me. “Three weeks of it. She thought the television was talking to her. She thought I was her brother Walt half the time. God rest her, she didn’t know what she was writing. Darla knows that. Darla’s a nurse.” He made the word sound like it came in a bin. “Darla knows exactly what that medicine does to a person, and she’s standing here using it.”
“She wasn’t on morphine,” I said.
“You weren’t there.”
“No,” I said. “You saw to that.”
Shante stepped up beside the piano. She didn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t have to. She runs four hospitals.
“Ernie, I was in the room. Your wife was on a blood pressure pill and Tylenol until the last two days. She did the Tribune crossword in pen on Thursday. On Friday she signed a trust with her attorney and with me as her witness. She asked me to read it back to her, and she corrected his spelling of Darla’s middle name.”
“Jean,” I said. “With no E at the end. It’s on the family list. Under NOT FAMILY.”
That one landed. I saw it go through three people near the hall, the ones who’d been at the hospital.
Dad turned red from the collar up. I’ve seen that color on patients. You keep an eye on it.
“This is my house,” he said.
“No,” Shante said. “It isn’t.”
William finally moved. He picked up his bourbon off the piano, looked at it, and put it down again, which for William is a full nervous breakdown.
“Dad,” he said. “What is she talking about?”
And Dad, my father, the man who once fired a warehouse manager over a fourteen-dollar parking ticket, looked at his son and lied straight into his face in front of sixty people.
“Your mother changed her mind about a lot of things at the end. I took care of it.”
“Took care of it how?”
“The way I take care of everything in this family.”
Kristy, behind William, said the first words I’d heard from her all day.
“Ernie, sit down.”
He didn’t sit down.
Sixty People in Good Shoes
“Fifty-one percent,” Shante said to the room, as if reading an invoice. “Lucille owned half of Tovar Medical from the day it was founded. Her father put up the money. It was in her name. She added one share Ernie had signed over to her in 1998 for the taxes. Fifty-one. All of it goes to Darla. And the house, which was hers too.”
“That’s a lie,” Dad said.
“Call your own lawyer,” Shante said. “He was at the funeral. He’s eating your shrimp.”
Every head in the room turned to a bald man by the dining room door, who stopped chewing.
He nodded. Just once.
That was all it took. I’ve watched a lot of people realize they’re dying. It doesn’t look like the movies. They don’t gasp. They get very busy with their hands. Dad started straightening things on the piano. William’s glass. A stack of sympathy cards. My mother’s pill bottle, which he picked up, finally, and turned over, and stared at the empty sticky spot where the note had been.
“She wrote it under the bottle,” he said. He sounded almost impressed.
“You counted the pills,” I said. “Every day at two.”
“Somebody had to make sure they were giving her the right dose.”
“I know,” I said. “Somebody had to.”
He heard his own words come back in mine. I saw it.
Then he did the thing I had been waiting fourteen years for and hadn’t known I was waiting for. He got loud.
“Twenty-two years I gave you that company!” He slammed the bottle down on the piano and the pills jumped. “I trained you. I put you in front of every buyer in this state. And you walked out on me to hold bedpans. You embarrassed me in front of everybody I know, and you want to stand in my living room and tell me I’m the one who did something wrong? I wrote that letter because your mother was too soft to do it. Somebody had to keep this family together.”
The room went dead quiet.
He’d said it. Out loud. I wrote that letter.
Somewhere by the kitchen, a neighbor named Mrs. Mejia, who’d been bringing Mom zucchini bread since the Reagan administration, said, “Ernie,” in a voice like a door closing.
William’s face did the old-paint thing. I’d heard that expression from a patient once, a housepainter, and never understood it until right then.
“You told me she wanted nothing to do with us,” William said to me. Then he turned to Dad. “You told me Darla said that. You told me she hung up on Mom. I’ve been texting her happy birthday like a coward for fourteen years because you said she’d made her choice.”
“You could have called her,” Dad said.
“Mom asked me for her number,” William said. “Twice. I told her it didn’t work. Because you told me it didn’t work. I never even tried it.”
He took out his phone right there by the piano. His fingers weren’t working right. He found my name, which took him a while, because I’m apparently under “Sis” and also under “Darla T.” He pressed it.
My phone rang in my coat pocket.
It played the tone it always plays, the little xylophone thing. In that room it sounded like a fire alarm.
William stood there holding his phone to his ear and listening to my pocket ring.
He hung up. He put both hands over his face and his shoulders went. My little brother. Sixty-two years old in a nine-hundred-dollar suit, crying by a piano where I’d learned “Heart and Soul.”
Kristy put her hand flat on his back.
Then she looked at me, actually at me, for the first time since 2012, and said, “I’m sorry, Darla. I knew it was wrong. I did what was easier.”
I nodded. I didn’t have anything better.
Dad turned to Shante. I think he still thought he could sell his way out. He’s like a good hospice patient that way. He still had his eye on the door.
“Shante. Let’s set this aside. Family business. You and I have been talking about that contract for six years. I’ve got the best pricing in the region on wound care—”
“You had six years,” Shante said. “Mr. Tovar, I will never buy one box of gauze from you. Not one. If your daughter runs that company, she can call me on Monday. If you run it, don’t call me at all.”
“I run it.”
“You own forty-nine percent of it,” his lawyer said, from the dining room door, with a shrimp tail in his hand. “Ernie. I’m sorry. She owns the controlling interest as of this morning.”
And then, one by one, the people in good shoes started finding their coats.
The hospital buyers went first. They didn’t say goodbye to him. One of them shook my hand at the door and said, “I’m sorry about your mother,” and nothing else, which was exactly right. The neighbors went next, Mrs. Mejia last. She stopped by the piano, took a square of zucchini bread off the plate she’d brought, wrapped it in a napkin and put it in her purse. She was not leaving Ernie Tovar her bread.
The three reps who’d laughed at the start were the slowest. The one with the shiny haircut came over and stood in front of me, bright pink.
“Ma’am, I didn’t know.”
“You laughed before you knew,” I said. “That’s what you’ll want to think about.”
He nodded and went.
By ten to four, the living room had four people in it, plus the lawyer, who was now quietly putting his coat on in the dining room and trying to be furniture.
Dad sat down on the piano bench, finally. He looked eighty-six. He’d never looked it before.
“What happens now?” he said. To me. The first question he’d asked me in fourteen years that wasn’t a sneer.
Rent
I took the pill bottle off the piano. I put it in my coat pocket with my phone, which was still warm from ringing.
“You stay in the house,” I said.
He looked up.
“You’ll pay rent. Mom’s lawyer will tell you how much. It’ll be fair. I’m not you.” I shifted my weight off the bad knee. “William runs sales, if he wants to. He reports to me. You don’t come in the office. You don’t call buyers. You don’t sign anything.”
“It’s my company.”
“It’s forty-nine percent your company,” I said. “And it was Mom’s money.”
“And what do I tell people?”
“Tell them the truth. You wrote a letter.”
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Second time in one day. If I were a crueler woman I’d have written it on the calendar.
I didn’t stay to watch him. I’d watched him enough. I’d spent twenty-two years watching him, learning how to read a buyer, how to close on a Friday, how to make a man feel like the smartest person in the room. I’d been very good at it. That was the problem. I’d been very good at it and I’d hated every single day after the year Grandpa went into a nursing home and the nurses there were kinder to him than his own son was.
That’s why I left. Not to embarrass anybody. To be the person in the room who stays.
I went up to Mom’s room instead.
The stairs took me forever. William came behind me without being asked and walked one step below, the way you walk behind somebody on a new knee. I didn’t tell him to. He’d figured it out. Maybe he’s teachable after all.
Mom’s room smelled like her hand cream. Her reading glasses were on the nightstand. Her slippers were by the bed, side by side, toes out, where she could see them.
Like Mr. Pettway’s shoes in Room 6. Exactly like that.
I sat on the edge of her bed and put the pill bottle on the nightstand next to her glasses. The cap with the little ridge. I turned it so the label faced out, LUCILLE TOVAR, so anybody who came in would read it.
William stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
“I’m going to call you,” he said. “On the phone. Not text.”
“You’ll get my voicemail. I work nights.”
“I’ll leave a message.”
“It’s full.”
“I’ll call back.”
That made me laugh, which made me cry, which I’d managed not to do at the grave, in the living room, or on the porch. Turns out it was waiting for my mother’s slippers. Grief’s like that. It waits for the dumbest object in the room.
William sat down beside me on the bed. He didn’t say anything. He just sat, like I sit with people. Somebody must have taught him that without him knowing it. Mom, probably.
When I came back down at a quarter past four, the sleet had stopped. The porch light was on. Dad was still on the piano bench, and Kristy was putting plastic wrap on the shrimp, and Shante was in the front hall pulling on her black coat.
“Monday,” she said.
“Monday,” I said. “I’ll need to buy a suit.”
“Wear the pin.”
I went out onto the porch to see her off. The rail was wet. Her two paper cups were still sitting on it where I’d left mine, cold now, with a skin of sleet melting in the lid.
The door opened behind me, the way it had an hour before.
It was William. He had two mugs, the real ones, Mom’s blue ones from the cabinet over the stove, with steam coming off them.
He held one out.
“It’s decaf,” he said. “You’re a nurse. I figured you’d yell at me.”
I took it.
“Good,” I said. “You’re learning.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose mother wrote everything in pen.
Family loyalty can get complicated when caregiving and trust collide – these stories of relatives crossing the line may resonate, from being mocked while recovering from hip surgery to a sister misusing credit cards and a teacher mistreating a granddaughter after a medical emergency.
