My wife tipped a crystal decanter of tea over my mother’s head in the lounge at Fox Run, and I’m the one who told Mom to GO — then Stan, the club manager, came after her with pages from the account I set up for her after Dad’s funeral.
It was her mother’s birthday lunch. I phoned Mom Thursday and said come. I never told Kristen.
Since we buried Dad, Mom has taken his banquette by the window every Sunday.
She had a birthday card for Joann in her handbag.
Kristen came in from her 11:00 match and saw Mom at the bar.
She took the decanter off the silver tray and poured EVERY drop on Mom.
Mom didn’t move. Tea ran down her blue dress. Out on court three a kid kept serving into the net.
“You were not invited to this,” Kristen said. She pointed back at her own mother’s table. “This lunch is for my mother.”
“My son asked me to come,” Mom said.
Then Kristen’s finger came at Mom’s face and hung a knuckle’s width from her nose.
“You get one,” Mom said. “There will not be two.” Then she looked at me. “Is that what you want?”
Eight years married. I know which answer ends a lunch.
“Mom, I think you should go.”
She carried her handbag to the glass doors in both hands, the way she carries it into church.
Two Sundays ago she said the club keeps calling to confirm her Monday at four. She doesn’t have a Monday at four. I said they had her mixed up and passed the potatoes.
Her login is on a sticky note on her fridge.
I never opened it ONCE.
Stan got to her before the doors. He gave me my first job, racking balls, and he carried Dad’s casket.
The club flags accounts when lessons outrun the member. Hers got flagged Friday. He wasn’t letting her leave without seeing it.
He had four pages, stapled.
“Your account paid for nineteen private lessons.”
NINETEEN. On MY MOTHER’S account.
I faced my wife. “Whose lessons?”
Kristen’s face went pale under the visor.
Behind her, Joann held her white wine in both hands and didn’t drink.
The top page
Stan didn’t answer me. He answered Mom, like I’d asked through her.
“They’re Kristen’s, Mrs. Costello. Private lessons with Dom, Mondays at four.” He turned the top page so she could see it. “Booked in your name. The first Monday in May through last Monday.” He looked at the tray, the empty decanter. “Today’s lunch is on your number too. I’ve put a hold on it.”
Kristen’s lessons. My wife had been taking private tennis lessons from the club pro, an hour every Monday, as my mother. The club wasn’t mixed up. The club had been calling the member to confirm her Monday at four, and the member was Mom.
And I’d passed the potatoes.
Joann set her wine glass down finally, very carefully, like it might go off.
“Kristen, you told me Brendan was paying for those,” she said.
“Mom, stop talking.”
“Well, you did.”
Mom still hadn’t moved from where Stan caught her. Tea was dripping off her pearl earrings onto the shoulder of the blue dress. She held her handbag in front of her the same way, both hands, and she didn’t look at the pages. She looked at Stan.
“Thank you, Stan,” she said.
That was all. Thank you, like he’d brought her a menu.
Then she went out the glass doors, and he let her go, and he came back across the lounge with the pages still in his hand. Kristen was still beside me, close enough to smell her sunscreen, and neither of us had moved.
“Stan, she booked a lesson. So she used the wrong name. We’ll pay it back.”
He didn’t look at Kristen. He looked at me, the way he used to look at me when I left the ball hopper out in the rain.
“Ask your wife what she told Dom,” Stan said.
Dad’s side
My dad, Frank, joined when I was little because a guy from his office said it was where you met people. He played terrible golf for thirty years and loved every minute of it. Mom never played anything. She sat in the lounge, at the banquette by the window that looks down onto court three, with a book and a glass of tea. When Dad came off the eighteenth, he’d find her there and tip the bartender in cash, a folded five. After he died she kept doing it.
When he died, I figured she’d quit. It isn’t cheap, and she doesn’t golf, and everybody was going to look at her like the widow.
She went that Sunday. Same banquette. His side.
“Where else would I sit,” she said, when I asked.
The week after the funeral I sat at her kitchen table and moved everything online that Dad used to handle. The electric. The water. The club. I set up a login for Fox Run with autopay from her checking, so she’d never have to think about the bill again. She doesn’t do passwords. So I wrote it on a yellow sticky note, her member number and the password, which was Dad’s name and the year they got married, and I stuck it on her fridge under the magnet from the Outer Banks.
Kristen was at that table for most of that week too.
There were a hundred and forty thank-you cards to write after the funeral. Flowers, casseroles, the Knights of Columbus, the guys from Dad’s office. Mom sat down to do them and couldn’t. She’d write “Dear” and stop.
So Kristen did them. Two nights, at that kitchen table, with a box of cards and one of Mom’s pens, and she signed every one of them from Mom so nobody would have to know Mom couldn’t. Mom leaned over at one point, looked at one, and laughed. The first time she’d laughed since the hospital.
“That’s better than mine,” Mom said.
I loved my wife a lot that week.
Mom loved her too. That Christmas she gave Kristen a little envelope with a plastic card in it. A family card on the account. Court time and the pool. Mom had the club send it out marked in writing, court time and pool only, and Kristen said thank you and hugged her. Mom wasn’t being cheap. Mom has never signed a blank check for anybody, me included.
Kristen took up tennis like it was a job after that. Ladies’ league, the white dresses, the visor. Sunday matches at eleven. I don’t play. I was glad she had something.
And every Sunday night after, we ate at Mom’s. Kristen always went to the fridge for the butter.
Across the lounge, the glass doors were still standing open where she’d gone out.
Monday at four
We didn’t finish the lunch. Joann put two twenties on the table, which is funny if you think about it, and Kristen drove her home.
I drove to Mom’s. Her car was in the driveway. The kitchen light was on. She didn’t answer the door and she didn’t answer her phone, and after the third call it went straight to voicemail.
There was a wet dish towel hanging over the porch rail, like she’d come in and wiped off her face and hair with it and gone back out to hang it up.
I drove home.
Kristen was at our kitchen island, still in the white dress, with her laptop open. She started before I got my keys down.
“Your mother gave me a card that does court time. Court time. Like an allowance. Like I’m twelve. Everybody in the league takes lessons from Dom. Everybody. I was the only one on the team who couldn’t book him, because your mother wrote a note. Dom said it was fine. Dom said family’s family.”
“So you booked him as her.”
“The club only books lessons for a full member. She’s a full member. It’s a family account. I’m family.” She said it like she was reading off a list she’d made in the car. “It was a hundred and thirty-five dollars a week. It’s nothing to her. She wouldn’t even notice.”
“She noticed. They kept calling her.”
“And she told them they had the wrong person, and that was the end of it. She told you too, didn’t she? And what did you say?”
I didn’t answer that.
“Where did you tell me you went on Mondays?”
She looked at the laptop. “The dentist.”
“For five months.”
“I have a lot going on with my teeth, Brendan.”
“Why’d you pour it on her?”
“Because you invited her to my mother’s birthday and didn’t tell me. Because she walked in with a card in her purse and sat down at that banquette like she owned the place.”
“She’s a member. She kind of does.”
Kristen shut the laptop and put her hand flat on it.
“I didn’t take anything from her. I took it from the account.”
The fridge
I went to bed and didn’t sleep. A little before one I got up, got in the car, and drove back to my mother’s house.
I’ve had a key since high school. I’d never used it at night without calling first.
The house was dark. Her bedroom door at the top of the stairs was shut, and the line of light under it was gone. I stood in the hall a minute and didn’t go up.
The sticky note was still on the fridge. Yellow, curled at the bottom, under the Outer Banks magnet. My handwriting. I peeled it off and sat at her kitchen table, where the thank-you cards had been, and logged in on my phone for the first time since the day I made it.
The statement page goes by month. I went back to May.
Dues. Her food and beverage minimum, which she never comes close to, because she orders a cup of soup and leaves half of it. Then, the first week of May, a line I’d never seen.
Private lesson, D. Rossi, 60 min. $135.00.
Then the next Monday. Then the next. Every Monday at four, all summer, except Memorial Day and Labor Day, because Dom doesn’t teach on holidays. I counted them twice on the back of her electric bill. Nineteen lessons. Two thousand five hundred and sixty-five dollars, paid out of her checking like clockwork, because I’d set it up to be paid like clockwork.
That number was bad. I’d been braced for it since the lounge.
Then I tapped on one of the lessons to see the details, and there was a little gray field I didn’t expect.
Source.
Most things on the account said Front desk. The bar tab said Front desk. The dues said Auto.
The lessons didn’t. Every one of the nineteen said the same two words. Kristen hadn’t walked up to the desk and said she was my mother. She’d sat somewhere with a member number and a password and booked them the way you’d book a haircut.
I looked at the empty spot on the fridge door where the note had been.
Member login. The one I made.
Dom’s binder
I was at Fox Run at eight the next morning in the clothes I’d slept in, which is to say the clothes I hadn’t slept in.
Stan was in his office behind the front desk. There’s a photo on his wall of a member-guest from years back, and my dad’s in it, second row, with a sunburn. He didn’t look surprised to see me.
“I logged in,” I said. “They were booked online. I need to see the rest.”
He looked at me a long time. Then he got up and walked me down the hall to the pro shop.
Dom wasn’t in yet. A kid behind the counter was folding towels. Stan reached under the register and pulled out a fat blue three-ring binder with the year on the spine in marker.
“Every one of them, the member signed for,” Stan said. “When somebody books a lesson online, the booking’s not the charge. The member signs a chit at the court. Dom keeps the carbons. The chit’s what we hold up if anybody ever says they didn’t authorize it.”
He opened it on the counter. Monthly tabs, the kind you buy at the drugstore. He went to May and put his finger on the signature line of the first one.
Rosemary Costello.
It was my mother’s name, and it was very nearly my mother’s signature. The R was right. The tall C was right. But the y at the end had a long, clean tail that curled back under the whole name, and my mother’s y has never done that in her life. Hers stops short and kind of gives up.
I’d seen that tail on a hundred and forty thank-you cards. I’d licked the envelopes. And I’d watched her learn it, the first night, a whole legal pad of Rosemary Costellos at Mom’s kitchen table, until Mom leaned over and laughed.
Stan turned the pages slowly, and I’ll give him that. He didn’t rush it. May, with a gap for Memorial Day. June. July. August. September, with a gap for Labor Day. Nineteen chits, nineteen Rosemary Costellos, every tail curled under.
Behind us the kid kept folding towels.
“The system flags it when the lessons outrun the member,” Stan said. “Your mother’s never taken a lesson in thirty years. It flagged Friday. I pulled these and I knew the court and the time, because I walk past court three at four o’clock every Monday. I know who’s out there.”
“Dom took these from her? Standing there?”
“Dom says she told him that on a family account, family signs the member’s name. She’s in his league. She tips him at Christmas.” Stan closed the binder and kept his hand on it. “He didn’t ask. He should have, and he knows it, and he’s going to say so to the board.
“A signature that isn’t the member’s is a club matter first. It goes to the board. They can bar her from the grounds. They can bill her directly. If your mother wants, they can send it to the police. The bank won’t do anything, because as far as the bank knows, your mother paid her own club. It all starts with one question.”
“What question?”
He took his hand off the binder.
“The board’s going to ask your mother if that’s her signature.”
The tomato bed
Stan made me copies of all nineteen on the machine behind the front desk, and gave me a form, one page, the club’s form for a member contesting a signature. There was a line for the member and a line for a witness.
Kristen was on the couch in sweatpants when I got home. I laid the copies on the coffee table in a row. It took a while. Nineteen is a lot of paper when you put it down one at a time.
She looked at them and then at me, and I watched her decide what to say. You can see it with Kristen if you know her. It takes about two seconds.
“Okay. So what.”
“That’s my mother’s name.”
“I sign her name all the time. I signed it a hundred and forty times, and she thanked me. She told me it was better than hers. You were there. She said I could sign for her anytime.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “Nobody called the police about a thank-you card.”
“These aren’t thank-you cards.”
“They’re chits for tennis. At her club. That she never uses. You want to take this to the board? Fine. Take it to the board.” She talked faster now. “Here’s what the board sees. A widow who’s been telling the club she doesn’t know anything about a Monday at four. A woman who keeps her password on the refrigerator. Who has her son pay her bills. And I’m going to sit there and say she asked me to take lessons with her, because she wanted to get back out there like when Frank was alive, and then she forgot. Who do they believe, Brendan? The woman who forgets, or me?”
“She didn’t forget anything.”
“She didn’t remember her Mondays. You told her they had her mixed up. You. That’s what you’ll be saying too, when they ask. That your mother gets mixed up.” She stood. “And don’t you stand there like you’re shocked about money. You’ve never opened a bill in your life. I asked you in April if I could take some lessons from Dom and you said sure, whatever you want, and went back to the game. So I did what I wanted.”
I didn’t argue with her. I sat at the kitchen island and filled in the witness half of the club’s form while she talked. I wrote that the handwriting on the nineteen chits was my wife’s, Kristen Costello’s. I printed my name under it and signed it with my own signature, which has no tails on anything.
Then I opened the bank app and moved $2,565 out of the savings account I’d had since before I met her, what was left of the down payment money, into Mom’s checking. The club could credit her whenever the club got around to it. She wasn’t going to wait on them for her own money.
Kristen read it over my shoulder.
“You’re going to pay her for lessons she already paid? That’s insane.”
I put three days of clothes in a gym bag.
“Where are you going?”
“My mom’s.”
“She won’t even let you in.”
I took the copies and the form and the gym bag and drove the twenty minutes across town.
The dish towel was gone from the porch rail. Her car was in the driveway. I could see her through the side gate, out back in the tomato bed on her knees, pulling the last of them before the frost.
I walked around the side and stood at the gate. “Mom.”
She sat back on her heels and looked at me for a long time. She didn’t get up.
I went to her. I stood in the dirt and turned the pages one at a time, and she read them from where she knelt, a muddy thumb on the corner of each one.
“That’s the good one,” she said. “That’s the one she did.”
“I know.”
“They kept calling. I thought I was losing it. I thought, Rosemary, you’ve finally gone like your mother went.”
“I told you they had you mixed up.”
“You did.” She looked at the chits a while longer. “I should’ve made you look.”
She got up and went inside through the back door, and I heard a drawer in the kitchen open and shut.
She came out with the legal pad.
Sunday, the window
The top page was still there, a whole page of Rosemary Costellos in blue ink, every tail curled under, and one at the bottom in Mom’s own hand, where she’d tried to copy Kristen copying her. Mom signed the member line of the club’s form right there in the yard with her knees still muddy, and I drove it and the pad to Stan that afternoon.
The board barred Kristen from the grounds the next week and billed her for the nineteen. Mom decided not to call the police. She said she’d buried one person already and wasn’t sending another one anywhere. The $2,565 came back to her account as a credit in October. She tried to send it to me. I told her no.
Kristen and I have a mediator now. We meet Wednesdays in an office above a mattress store. I rent a one-bedroom across town that smells like the last guy’s cat.
On the first Sunday in November I got to Fox Run at noon, and she was already at Dad’s banquette by the window. Blue dress. A different one. Pearls. Her handbag on the seat beside her with her book on top.
Court three was empty. They’d taken the nets down for the season.
The bartender brought over the silver tray with the decanter and two glasses. Before he left, she pressed a folded five into his hand, the way Dad did.
I picked up the decanter before she could.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
I filled her glass and set the decanter back on the tray.
If you’ve got a parent who’s been telling you something small for weeks, go sit at their kitchen table this Sunday and open the mail with them.
Family drama can be wild, can’t it? For more tales of unexpected twists, check out My Brother Showed Me a Will From 2011 at Our Father’s Kitchen Table or read about a different kind of sibling story in My Brother Spent His Birthday Money Replacing The Metronome They Broke. And if you’re up for another story about complicated relationships, you might enjoy The Decree Handed Shawna Alternate Weekends, and She Came for Six of Them.
