The Money She Said She Spent To Raise Me

I put the sandwich down without taking a bite.

“I don’t owe her anything.”

“You have no idea what children cost,” Celia said.

Nola pulled out the chair beside mine.

“I think she knows what being one cost.”

Mr. Pike asked us to move to a small side room. Celia followed until he held the door.

“I’ll speak with you separately.”

“I’m her aunt.”

“Mara is an adult.”

He waited for me to choose. I nodded to Nola, and she came in with us.

The room held a mop bucket and a table covered in clean cups.

Mr. Pike said the address he had for me was an old apartment. His first letter had come back. I gave him my new address and watched him write it down.

“I don’t represent you,” he told me. “My duty is to the estate. You should have your own lawyer.”

“I have six hundred and eighty-three dollars.”

He did not smile or tell me it would work out.

“There’s a clinic in Reno. I can give you the number.”

That helped more.

He laid out three pages. The first was a copy of Grandpa’s latest will. It left Juniper Court and what remained in his accounts to me, after debts and expenses.

The second was Celia’s objection to that will. She claimed Grandpa had been confused when he signed it.

The third was her claim for seventy-two thousand dollars.

“Twelve years of support,” Mr. Pike said. “Five hundred dollars per month. She says your grandfather promised to repay money she spent raising you.”

I read my name three times.

“She left me at a station.”

Nola’s fingers tightened around her purse.

Mr. Pike wrote down the station, my age, and Edie’s name. He did not rush me.

“Your grandfather’s accounts held one hundred eighty-six thousand four hundred dollars at his death,” he said. “The apartments were recently valued at nine hundred forty thousand.”

I looked at my wet cuffs again.

“That doesn’t mean you have that money available,” he added. “There’s a two hundred twenty thousand dollar loan against the property. We’re still tracing where the funds went.”

“Did Grandpa take it out?”

“Your aunt signed under a power of attorney. That authority ended when he died.”

Outside the door, dishes clattered.

“She wanted the apartments sold,” Nola said. “She told us to start looking.”

Mr. Pike slid the envelope toward me.

Inside was a letter and a small brass key taped to a card.

Mara,

If you are reading this, I ran out of time to explain in person. I believed things I should have checked. I am sorry. You were a child. Finding you was my job.

There were more lines, but I could not see them clearly.

Nola pushed a box of tissues across the table.

“He found an old article about Edie,” she said. “A school thanked her for making winter coats. You were standing beside her.”

I remembered that picture. I had held a crooked cardboard sign.

“He knew you hadn’t gone to Oregon,” Nola said.

“Oregon?”

She looked at Mr. Pike.

“That’s what Celia told him. A private adoption. Then letters saying you wanted him to leave you alone.”

I pressed my thumb against the key.

“I never wrote that.”

“He hired someone to look into it,” Mr. Pike said. “His letter says the records are in his bank box. We’ll obtain access through the estate.”

I drove home with the envelope flat on the seat beside me.

Edie was waiting in her slippers. I had called from the parking lot, but I still had to say it again.

“He thought I didn’t want him.”

She took off my damp work shirt and handed me a sweater, as she had when I was small.

“Sit down.”

She brought out a biscuit tin. Every letter I had received was in it, along with copies of the ones we had sent.

There were only three replies. All typed. All mailed through the same Fallon post office box Celia had given us.

Edie laid them in order.

“I should have found another way,” she said.

“You stayed.”

She looked at me then.

“Yes. I did.”

The last reply had arrived when I was sixteen.

Hal is too ill to receive visitors. His doctor forbids all contact.

Under it was a signature I knew from old birthday cards.

My mother’s name.

She had been dead for nine years.