Mom had a savings account with about $9,000 in it. We agreed — Daniel, my mother, and I, in a phone call with all three of us — that we wouldn’t drain her savings entirely on a roof. She needed that money for emergencies and for the months when her Social Security didn’t quite cover everything. I said I would cover it.
My savings, at that point, were not abundant. I had been earning part-time income for five years and putting money away when I could but drawing on it when I had to, which was more often than I liked. I had about $26,000 in a savings account, which sounds reasonable until you consider that it was the entirety of my financial cushion and I was living on a part-time bookkeeper’s income with no employer benefits.
I paid the $22,000.
I wrote two checks to the roofing company, separated by two weeks, while the work was happening in two phases. I kept both checks, both invoices, and the roofer’s written estimate. These went in the folder.
A few days after the second phase of work was done, I came home from Theresa’s Saturday morning shift — I usually ran errands while Theresa was with Mom — to find my mother at the kitchen table with a legal pad and her reading glasses.
“I’m writing something,” she said.
“Okay.”
“For you.” She pushed the pad across the table.
It was two paragraphs in her looped handwriting. The first paragraph said that she knew the roof had been expensive and that I’d paid for it myself. The second paragraph said that when the house was eventually sold, the first thing that should happen was repaying me the money I’d advanced.