My sister-in-law had stuck forty-one yellow tabs down the edge of the folder, and each one said HERE in her round little print.
Her other hand was clamped on my wrist, pushing the pen into my fingers until the clip bit my knuckle.
My brother leaned against my refrigerator with a toothpick from the diner in the corner of his mouth.
He used to lean on it exactly like that when it was our mother’s.
It still was, mostly. Her yellow curtains. Her pig magnet holding up a church bulletin from two autumns back.
The house outside Sedalia had been mine for the fourteen months since we buried her.
Curtis was somewhere past Amarillo with a trailer of frozen chicken behind him. He wasn’t due home until Sunday.
Macy was on the step stool at the end of the counter, stirring chocolate milk with a butter knife.
She was seven. She had stood on that stool since she was three, helping her grandma sort the mail into piles.
“Pen’s in your hand, Dana,” Shelly said. “Just write.”
I didn’t answer her.
She hated that worse than anything I could have said. She bore down on my wrist until the bones rubbed, and I still didn’t answer her.
Since the funeral they’d come at me a little at a time.
Randy carrying our mother’s gray lockbox out to his truck the week we buried her, saying somebody ought to keep the papers safe.
Shelly at Macy’s birthday with cake on a paper plate, asking what the taxes ran on a place like this and who was paying them.
Randy on my porch in July wanting the title to the riding mower, telling me FAMILY SPLITS EVEN like it was carved over a courthouse door.
Petty things, spaced out so none of them looked like much by itself.
Then they came with the folder.
It was pages long, and all I needed to see was my name typed at the top and Randy’s typed right under mine.
“Randy’s got every paper she ever signed,” Shelly said. “Box and all. Your name’s on nothing.”
Randy took the toothpick out. “She never went near the courthouse without me driving her.”
That wasn’t true.
I drove her once, the winter before she got sick. She had me wait in the truck with the heater going, and she came out hugging her purse against her coat and said it was errands.
Macy brought it up on her own two weeks ago, while we folded towels on the couch.
“Aunt Shelly asked if Grandma ever told me secrets,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “And you said?”
“Just that there’s a song. She said sing it. I said Grandma said only for you.”
“Then sing it for me,” I said.
And she did, bouncing on the cushion like it was jump rope, two numbers and a word, around and around, the way my mother must have drilled it into her over the mail.
I’ve read other people’s paperwork for sixteen years, billing claims for an orthopedic office on Broadway. I know a book and a page when a child sings one at me.
I drove to the county recorder on my lunch the next day.
The woman at the window typed in what Macy sang, tipped her monitor toward herself, and printed one page. She pressed the seal into the corner hard enough to rattle her pens.
Recorded eleven months before my mother died.
I read it twice in the truck. Then I folded it in thirds and slid it behind the bread box, and it had been there ever since.
It sat three feet from Shelly’s elbow.
Shelly let go of my wrist and slapped the folder flat.
“This is the nice way, Dana,” she said.
I laid the pen across the top tab.
“I’m not signing ANY of it,” I said.
Randy came off the refrigerator. He took me by the shoulder and walked me backward until the counter’s edge caught me low in the back, and then he kept leaning.
The dishwasher ticked through its rinse.
My mouth stayed shut.
Shelly crouched down beside the stool, all sugar.
“Macy, honey. Grandma ever tell you anything about this house?”
Macy kept stirring. The knife went around the glass, tick, tick, like the dishwasher.
“Just the song,” she said.
Shelly’s smile held. Her eyes came up to mine over Macy’s head.
I smiled back.
Because the page was behind the bread box.
Because the county had its own on a shelf, and would still have it after all three of us were in the ground.
Because the only person my mother trusted with the numbers was sitting on a step stool in chocolate-milk socks, and Shelly had just asked her for them in front of me.
Randy had propped the storm door with his boot on the way in. I watched him do it.
He never heard the pickup on the gravel. The dishwasher was too loud.
Then the front door swung in and knocked the coat hooks.
Curtis stood in it with his thermos in one hand and his keys still hooked on a finger. Road grit on his boots. He was five days early.
He looked at the folder with its yellow tabs.
He looked at Randy’s hand on my shoulder.
He looked at Macy, who had quit stirring.
Randy let go of me like I was a stove burner.
Curtis set the thermos down on the shoe bench, and the knock of it carried all the way to the sink.
Shelly’s hand went for the folder.
“LEAVE THE FOLDER ALONE, SHELLY,” he said, level enough that Macy laid her knife down. “I stopped at the county building on my way through town, and the woman at the window says Randy was in there Friday asking her to pull —”
Friday at the county window
“— every page recorded under Joyce Tolliver,” Curtis said. “Wanda printed the stack for him. He stood at her counter and read one of them twice. Then he paid for his own copy and put it in his shirt pocket.”
Randy’s hand went to his shirt pocket.
It was a different shirt. The hand went anyway.
Shelly turned from the folder to her husband, slow, the way a person turns toward a noise in the next room.
“Friday,” she said.
Randy put the toothpick back in his mouth and took it right out again.
“I was going to tell you,” he said.
“Friday you were at the tire place,” Shelly said. “Friday you came home and told me there wasn’t a thing in that box but her insurance cards.”
The dishwasher clicked off. The kitchen got very quiet without it.
Curtis hadn’t come off the rug by the door. He looked at me over all of them, and I gave him the smallest nod I had, so he’d know I was standing on my own.
I’d texted him a picture of the page two weeks ago from the county lot, the seal catching the light off my windshield. He called back an hour later from a fuel island somewhere in Oklahoma. He said he wanted to see it with his own eyes, on the counter where it came from, with the woman who printed it standing right there.
I told him it would keep until Sunday.
He did not wait until Sunday.
He dropped the trailer at the yard before five that morning and drove his pickup straight to the county building. He was waiting on the steps when they unlocked the doors.
Wanda at the recorder’s window knew the name Tolliver before he finished spelling it.
“Twice this month,” she told him. “Your brother-in-law stood right where you’re standing, Friday afternoon.”
I looked at the folder on my mother’s counter.
Forty-one yellow tabs. My name typed at the top.
Randy had read the page on Friday. He had carried it home in his pocket. Four days later he had driven his wife out here with a pen and let her hold my wrist while I used it.
Shelly hadn’t known. Anyone could see that in the way her eyes kept going from the tabs to him and back.
Macy had one hand flat on the counter and the other still around the butter knife.
“Can I get down?” she said.
“Right there’s fine, sweet pea,” Curtis said.
Then what had Randy let his wife type up for me?
The step stool
My mother bought that stool at the farm store the spring Macy turned three.
It’s white plastic, with a crack along the top step that pinches if you stand on it wrong. She set it at the end of the counter under the old wall phone. Every afternoon when the mail came, Macy climbed up to help.
Bills went in one pile. Church mail went in another.
My mother read every page before it went anywhere. She ran her finger down it line by line, lips moving, the same way she read recipes and the backs of seed packets.
“Read it or don’t put your name on it,” she told Macy.
She told me the same thing when I was nine, holding a field-trip slip out to her with a pen already in my other hand.
Most of why I ended up reading claims for a living is that sentence.
Randy never read anything. She read his field-trip slips and signed them for him. She read his first truck loan at the dealership while he picked out floor mats. When Shelly came along, Shelly did his reading, and my mother let her.
The winter before she got sick, I came by at four to pick Macy up and heard them from the porch.
My mother was singing. Macy was singing with her, a beat behind, the way kids do when they only half have it.
I knew the tune before I got the door open.
She had used it on Randy and me when we were small, to teach us our phone number, back when the phone was yellow and had a cord that reached the stove. We sang those seven digits on the kitchen floor until neither of us could have forgotten them if we tried.
I figured she was teaching Macy the old number for fun.
“That one’s retired,” I said, laughing, and hung my coat on the hook.
“This one’s newer,” my mother said.
She didn’t look up from the mail. She put her hand on top of Macy’s head.
“Only for your mama, remember,” she said. “Only if she asks.”
Macy nodded so hard the stool rocked.
I didn’t ask. I was tired, and it was a song, and my mother had a hundred small games with that child I was never let in on.
I heard the tune that day. I didn’t hear the words.
Randy learned our phone number to that tune, on the same linoleum.
Tab thirty-nine
“Take a chair, the two of you,” Curtis said.
“We’re not staying,” Shelly said.
Curtis didn’t argue. He leaned against the doorframe, which was the only way out, and unscrewed his thermos.
Shelly sat.
Randy stayed by the refrigerator until Curtis looked at him. Then he sat too, in the chair my mother used to take her shoes off in.
I pulled the folder over and opened it at the first tab.
“Randy’s got a Friday to explain,” I said. “I’ve got forty-one of these to read.”
Shelly laughed once, through her nose. “They’re just forms.”
I read them anyway.
I read them the way my mother read the mail, finger down the margin, one line at a time. It took most of an hour. Macy got down off the stool on her own and sat under the table with her milk, and nobody told her to go anywhere.
A thin gray line ran across the top of every page, the kind a fax machine leaves behind. MID-PETTIS TITLE, a phone number, and a date in August.
Shelly has answered the phones at Mid-Pettis Title for nine years.
“Standard family agreement,” she said, watching my finger. “I typed it up as a favor. Anybody would.”
Tabs one through thirty-eight divided things. The house, split down the middle. The mower. My mother’s truck. The good dishes and the good forks. My name sat on every line, waiting.
Tab thirty-nine was different.
It was on heavier paper, and it already had a signature on it that wasn’t Randy’s or Shelly’s.
Kurt Ambler, of Green Ridge.
Under his name was a price for my mother’s house. Under that it said earnest money received, four thousand dollars, dated August 14. Randy’s signature sat on the seller’s line. A second seller’s line was blank, with a yellow tab stuck beside it.
I put my finger on the blank line and left it there.
“Kurt Ambler,” I said.
“Guy from the plant,” Randy said. “He’s got three kids. His lease runs out at Thanksgiving.”
“And the four thousand dollars?”
Shelly looked at Randy. She had typed Kurt Ambler’s name herself, anybody could see that. She was waiting to hear about the money same as I was.
Randy looked at the pig magnet.
“It went on the truck,” he said.
My mother’s house had been sold in August, by a man who didn’t own it.
Tab forty-one
Tab forty was a list. Household goods, in the same even type as everything else.
Near the bottom it said one gold wedding band, to Shelly Tolliver.
My mother’s ring.
It had been in the gray lockbox since the funeral home handed it back to me in a little envelope. I had let Randy carry the box out to his truck because I couldn’t stand to look at it yet.
I turned to tab forty-one.
It was one page. Shelly’s typing, the fax line across the top. A heading in capitals, one paragraph under it, and a line at the bottom for me.
I read it out loud.
I read every word, slowly, finger under the line, the way my mother would have. My full name. My address. The word release. The words any instrument recorded by Joyce Ann Tolliver. The county. The words of my own free will.
Shelly’s face went a dull red from the collar up.
“People don’t read those out loud,” she said.
I read the last sentence again.
Then I got up, went to the bread box, and slid the page out from behind it.
It had gone soft at the folds from two weeks of being taken out and put back. I unfolded it on the counter next to tab forty-one and smoothed it with the side of my hand. The seal caught the window light.
In the top corner, in small print, the county had typed the book and the page.
Randy stood up to see it. He didn’t come any closer than the back of his chair.
Macy came out from under the table.
She climbed back up on the step stool and looked at the corner of the page. She read the numbers out loud the way she reads everything these days, a little proud of it.
Then she sang them.
She bounced on the cracked step and sang two-seventy-one, forty, Pettis, around and around, on my mother’s tune.
Randy sat down so hard the chair legs scraped.
He watched her mouth the whole time she sang. He was forty-some years old, and his lips moved with hers on the last line before he could stop them.
“She used that on us,” he said. “For the number.”
“I know,” I said.
He’d had the page in his pocket since Friday. He hadn’t known it came with a song.
The gray lockbox
Randy talked for a long time after that.
He talked to the table mostly, and sometimes to Curtis, and not once to Macy.
“I drove her to every appointment in Columbia,” he said. “I sat in that waiting room with the fish tank for two years. And you came on weekends.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“I found the county receipt last month, clipped behind her Medicare card. Paid, stamped, a book and a page. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a tax thing.”
Shelly was looking at the side of his head.
“Kurt was already asking when he could come measure for carpet,” Randy said. “I’d already spent his money. And then I go down there Friday and Wanda hands me that, and it’s got your name on it, and Macy’s under yours, and not one word about me.”
He laughed, and it came out wrong.
“Her own son, and not one word.”
Shelly said, “And you let me type that release.”
“I figured you’d sign,” Randy said, to me. “Anybody else, maybe not. But you always sign. The casket and the headstone, you just signed. I figured one more folder.”
He spread his hands at the tabs.
“A man gave me four thousand dollars, Dana. He’s got three kids. And I’m supposed to tell him what?”
I took my phone out of my back pocket.
The number was on tab thirty-nine, under Kurt Ambler’s signature, in his own handwriting. I dialed it standing at my mother’s counter with both pages in front of me.
He picked up on the second ring. He sounded young.
I told him who I was. I told him whose house it was, and the book and the page, and where the county building was if he wanted to go look for himself.
I told him Randy would be calling him about the four thousand dollars, and I looked at Randy while I said it.
Kurt Ambler said, “Okay,” twice. Then he said, “I’m real sorry about your mom.”
I hung up.
Randy stood.
“Her box stays with me,” he said. “The ring and her letters. I’ll burn them before they come back up this drive.”
“Keep it,” I said.
It was the ring I minded. I minded it right then, with my hand flat on the counter where she used to rest hers, and I said it anyway.
Shelly picked up the folder. She tore tab forty-one out of it herself. The fax line ran across the top of it, and she folded it with that side in, small, and put it in her purse.
She didn’t look at me once.
I peeled one blank yellow tab off the edge of the folder before she closed it.
Curtis stepped aside from the door.
The storm door banged twice behind them and stayed shut.
Sunday supper
Curtis made the pot roast, because he says mine comes out gray.
Macy set three plates. She stood on the stool to reach the good forks, the ones tab thirty-eight had given half of to Randy.
“Aunt Shelly coming to my birthday?” she said.
“I don’t think so, sweet pea,” I said.
She thought about that with a fork in each hand.
“Can I sing the song to anybody now?”
“Anybody you want,” I said.
The page went to the bank the morning after they left, in a manila envelope, into a drawer with Curtis’s name and mine on the card.
The night before it went, I wrote the book and the page on the yellow tab in my own hand. I stuck it on the refrigerator, under my mother’s pig magnet, over the church bulletin from two autumns back.
Randy hasn’t called.
Kurt Ambler did, once. He’d found a rental in Green Ridge with a fenced yard, and Randy had paid him back six hundred dollars so far.
The gray box is somewhere in Randy’s truck. My mother’s ring is in it.
I think about that every time I sign something.
Macy climbed down, climbed back up, and sang it for Curtis like a floor show. Book two-seventy-one. Page forty. Pettis. She sang it around and around, bouncing on the cracked step, loud enough to rattle the forks.
Curtis clapped with the oven mitts still on.
I stood at the sink and dried the same glass for a long time.
When she finished, she held her arms out wide on the stool and waited, and neither of us stopped clapping until she got down.
If this one got to you, send it to the one in your family who reads every page before they sign it.
For more wild stories involving family and unexpected twists, you might want to check out A Woman Called From My Husband’s Number in the Middle of His Shift, see what happened when The Vows Were Loaded on the Groom’s Own Tablet, Logged Into His Texts, or read about how I sent the hospital $140 a month for seven years over one text.
