PART 2
I fell to my knees in front of her wheelchair.
My mother put her shaking hands on my face, like she was making sure I was real. “She said a car accident,” Mom whispered. “In April. She said you were gone and there wasn’t a funeral because Denver was too far. I cried every night. I made you a scarf anyway. I didn’t know why. I just kept making it.”
She’d been knitting a scarf for a daughter she thought was dead.
And I’d been grieving a mother who was knitting it.
I stayed with her all afternoon. She remembered everything about me. My first word. My prom dress. The name of my first dog.
The nurse, Femi, sat with us for a while.
“She talks about you every day,” he said. “She always says, ‘My Tracy would come if she could.’”
That night, from a hotel room in Carbondale, I called the Illinois Department on Aging. Then the police. Then a lawyer.
The investigation took two months.
Lorna had moved our mother out of her house in April. She’d told the staff at Willow Bend that Mom had “no other family.” She’d stopped visiting after the first week.
Then she’d sold Mom’s house for $168,000. She’d been collecting Mom’s Social Security and pension every month. More than $2,800 a month. She used the money for a new car and a kitchen remodel.
The wooden box on her mantel was empty. She’d bought it online for forty dollars.
When the detective asked her why she told each of us the other one was dead, she said:
“So they’d stop asking questions.”
Lorna was charged with financial exploitation of an elderly person and theft. She lost her power of attorney. A judge appointed me as my mother’s guardian instead.
She pleaded guilty in the fall. She was ordered to pay back every dollar. She didn’t go to prison. She did lose the right to ever see our mother without supervision.
She hasn’t asked to.
I moved my mother to Denver in October. She lives in a small assisted living apartment fifteen minutes from my house. Her window looks out at the mountains.
I visit every day after work.
Last week, she finished the scarf.
It’s blue and lumpy and much too long. Some of the rows are uneven where her hands shook.
She wrapped it around my neck three times and laughed.
“There,” she said. “Now you’re really here.”
I wear it every day.
It’s not even that cold yet.
THE END.
