“Mom, you didn’t have to do this.”
“I know I didn’t have to,” she said, in the tone she used when she thought I was being slow. “I wanted to. That’s money you’re entitled to back.”
I looked at the note. I thought about saying more, but there wasn’t much to say. She’d thought it through and she’d written it down.
“Okay,” I said. I folded it and put it in my pocket.
That note went in the folder. I put it in a separate sleeve inside the folder, not filed with the general expense records, because something told me it was a different category of document.
I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe it was the bookkeeper’s instinct: this one is a receivable.
Daniel didn’t know about the note. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t think to. The roof had been repaired and the problem was solved and I didn’t expect the document to matter.
I was wrong about that.
The year the roof was replaced was also, though I didn’t know it at the time, the year my mother made a substantial transfer to Daniel. I would learn that later, when it was important, and the sequence of events would have its own kind of dark humor: the same year she couldn’t contribute to the house repair because my brother needed the money, he received $15,000 of it.
PRESSURE BECOMES PRACTICAL
The Friday deadline came and went without my response.
I had spoken to Patricia Okafor, the estate lawyer, who had been calm and thorough and in possession of no shortage of useful context. She told me several things I already knew and one thing I hadn’t thought through carefully.