When I asked Mom about her records, she told me to look inside her Bible. Tucked against the back cover was a bank envelope she’d used as a bookmark. It held a statement from before Lorna moved her out. There were three payments Mom recognized immediately: the gas bill, the electric bill, and a check to the man who cleared her driveway. She ran her finger down the column, still looking for the debts Lorna had told me about.
A few days later, the lawyer helped Mom request account records. The sale of the Rockford house had brought in $168,000. The money went into an account Lorna controlled. Mom’s Social Security and pension, together worth more than $2,800 a month, continued coming in after the move. Some of the outgoing payments went to a car dealership and a kitchen remodeling company.
Lorna called the day the bank asked her for supporting documents. She said she could explain the withdrawals if I came to Rockford alone. I asked her to send the receipts directly to the lawyer. Two nights later, a spreadsheet arrived by email with a column labeled Mom’s expenses. Lorna had listed a large payment as reimbursement for six months of private care.
The detective asked Willow Bend for its own billing records. They showed Mom had received publicly funded care and lived in the same room since April. Lorna had visited during the first week. After that, every entry in the visitor log beside Mom’s name belonged to a staff member, a volunteer, or me.
While we waited for the detective to trace more of the money, I called the woman who’d lived next door to Mom for twenty-eight years. She told me she’d seen Lorna loading boxes into her car the week Mom left. Lorna had said Mom was moving somewhere closer to family.
“I gave her a card to pass along,” the neighbor said. “It had my number inside. I figured Evelyn would call when she got settled.”
Mom had never received it. When the neighbor finally spoke to her over my phone, the first thing she said was that she still had the pie dish she’d borrowed at Christmas. Mom laughed and told her she could keep it. They stayed on the phone until a nurse came to take Mom to dinner.
By then, Lorna had sent me several messages offering to put some of the money back if I told the detective we’d settled things privately. I forwarded them to the lawyer. That same afternoon, the detective called to say she’d found a copy of the house sale paperwork bearing Mom’s old address as the destination for notices about the transaction.
I thought about the slippers by the back door. While paperwork was still being sent to that house, my mother was sitting two hundred miles away, asking when she could go home.
The detective spent two months following the money and interviewing people who had dealt with Lorna. When she finally asked Lorna about the wooden box, my sister admitted she’d bought it online for forty dollars. She’d set it on the mantel beside Mom’s ceramic bird and taken the picture herself. The box was empty.
I’d looked at that photograph on Mother’s Day. I’d opened it again on a Sunday when I had almost called Mom to ask what temperature she used for her apple cake. After hearing where the box came from, I took the picture out of my favorites and sent the original to the detective.
Lorna’s explanation for the lies was just as simple. The detective asked why she’d told Mom I died in a car accident and told me Mom died of a heart attack.
“So they’d stop asking questions,” Lorna said.
There was one conversation Mom insisted on having before the case went any further. She wanted Lorna to tell her where her belongings had gone. With a social worker present, Lorna called the facility. Mom asked about the slippers first, then the family photographs and the sewing machine she’d used to hem our school clothes.
Lorna said she’d donated almost everything. Some photographs might still be in her garage. Then she told Mom she’d spent years handling every little problem because I lived so far away. She said she’d been entitled to some of the money after all the time she’d put in.
“You could have asked me to pay you,” Mom said. “I would have listened.”
Lorna started to answer, but Mom asked the social worker to end the call. Afterward, she wanted to know if we could go to the cafeteria for a slice of pie. We went, and she ordered cherry. On the way back to her room, she asked whether I could put my Denver address in her Bible too.
The authorities charged Lorna with theft and financial exploitation of an elderly person. She lost her power of attorney, and a judge appointed me as Mom’s guardian after reviewing her needs. When I brought up moving to Denver, Mom asked how far she’d be from my house and whether she could bring her own chair. I told her I’d look for a place close enough to visit after work and big enough for the chair, if we could get it back.
The neighbors had kept an eye on the house after it sold, and that was how we found out the buyer still had a few things Lorna had left behind. I drove to Rockford and picked up the armchair from the enclosed porch. In a box underneath it, I found two school play programs with our names circled and a photograph of Lorna and me eating popsicles on the front steps.
Back at Willow Bend, Mom held the photograph by the edges. She told me Lorna had given me hers after I dropped mine, then gone inside and asked for another. I’d forgotten that afternoon completely. Mom tucked the photograph into her Bible and asked me to leave it there.
When I went downstairs that evening, the social worker gave me a bag with Mom’s knitting in it. Mom wanted me to take the unfinished scarf to Denver with the chair. She was worried someone might lose it during the move. I carried the bag up to her room again, and we put it beside the Bible so she could keep both with her on the flight.
Lorna pleaded guilty that fall. The judge ordered her to repay the money she’d taken and barred her from seeing Mom without supervision. She received no prison sentence. When I told Mom she could choose whether to agree to a supervised visit, she asked whether Lorna had requested one. Months later, she still hadn’t.
In October, Mom moved into an assisted living apartment fifteen minutes from my house. The first thing she noticed was the view of the mountains. The second was her armchair by the window. I’d cleaned the old upholstery as best I could, and she spent her first afternoon there going through the box of school programs and photographs.
I stopped by after work every day. Some afternoons she wanted to hear what I’d done at the records office. Other days I found her upset because she couldn’t remember which drawer held her teaspoons. We put a small tray beside the kettle, where she could keep two spoons and the packet of lemon cookies I’d finally brought her.
The scarf traveled from her knitting bag to the arm of her chair and back again. She worked on it in the morning while her hands were steady. One afternoon, I picked it up and asked how long she meant to make it.
“I kept thinking I ought to stop,” she said. “Then I’d sit by the window and do another row. It helped to have something to do with my hands after dinner.”
I asked her once if she’d like me to find a smaller pair of needles. She said she liked the ones she had. I turned the scarf over and saw where a loose stitch had opened into a little hole. Mom took it from me, looked at the spot, and carried on knitting.
I called Femi a few weeks after the move. He asked whether the scarf was finished yet. When I told him she was still going, he laughed and said Mom used to ask him whether blue would look good with my winter coat. I asked if she’d ever told him why she wanted him to call Denver when Lorna said I was dead.
“She said the number was still in the book,” he told me. “She wanted somebody to try it.”
Last week, I came by after work and found Mom waiting by the door with the scarf folded across her lap. She asked me to bend down. Then she wrapped it around my neck once, twice, and a third time before she reached the end. It was lumpy and uneven, and one end hung much farther down than the other.
“There,” she said, pulling it gently into place. “Now you’re really here.”
I wore it out to the car and into work the next morning. By noon, the office was warm enough that I took off my coat, but the scarf stayed around my neck. After work, I drove straight to Mom’s apartment.
She had the kettle on. Two spoons were waiting on the tray. When she saw me come through the door still wearing the scarf, she touched one of the loose stitches and tugged a little at the end she’d left too long. Then she handed me a lemon cookie and asked me to sit beside her while the tea brewed.
