I stood by the window and watched her walk to her car. She unlocked the driver’s door, paused, reached into her purse, and then closed the door without getting in.
She walked back toward the porch with her head down, her heels clicking against the wet concrete.
The back door did not latch right unless you locked it from the inside, and she was already back in the kitchen before I could even reach the hallway.
I found her in the dining room, her hands deep inside the bottom drawer of our oak sideboard.
She had three manila envelopes pulled halfway out, her fingers leafing through the old papers with a quick, practiced rhythm.
“I just came back for my keys, Luke, no need to look at me like that,” Clara said, her voice dropping its sweetness instantly.
She pulled her hands back quickly, her gold watch clinking against the brass drawer handle.
“They were on the kitchen counter,” I said, holding up the heavy keyring with the brass tag.
“Of course,” she said, snatching them from my palm. “My head is in the clouds these days with the shop.”
She did not look at the cardboard box of clothes on the table as she walked past me and out the door.
By half past ten, Vicky had gone to her bedroom to line up her plastic farm animals along the windowsill.
The duplex was quiet, except for the low hum of our old refrigerator and the dripping of the eaves outside.
I went back to the oak sideboard and pulled the bottom drawer all the way open.
The papers inside were dusty, smelling of old storage and dried ink.
I sorted through the utility bills from our parents’ old house, finding a gas statement for eighty-four dollars and a water bill from the summer.
Beneath a stack of tax returns from three years ago, my fingers hit something hard and bound in stiff cardboard.
It was an old green insurance ledger with my father’s name, Robert, written across the front in black felt-tip pen.
The ledger was from Indiana Mutual Insurance, the company that had handled the policy on our family home before the fire.
I sat on the floor, the cold wood pressing through my jeans, and opened the book on my knees.
The first few pages were filled with neat columns of numbers representing monthly premiums paid over the last ten years.
Tucked into the back pocket of the ledger was a long white envelope from First National Bank, postmarked two weeks after the fire occurred.
I pulled the envelope out and slid the contents onto the floor.
The clock on the wall read one in the afternoon when I finished comparing the ledger entries with the bank statements inside.
The statements covered our father’s personal checking account for the month of September.
I found the transaction on the third page of the statement, listed under the electronic withdrawals.
It was a cash withdrawal of three thousand two hundred dollars, taken directly from the branch on Main Street.
The signature on the authorization slip was neat and slanted, written in blue ballpoint ink.
It was Clara’s signature, not my father’s.
Underneath her name, she had written “authorized representative,” but there was no legal power of attorney attached to the file.
I looked at the date again, my fingers cold against the paper.
September twenty-fourth.
Two weeks after the fire, our father was still in the intensive care unit, unable to speak or hold a pen, and our mother had already been gone for ten days.
I stared at the slip, trying to understand how she had managed to get the bank to release that much money without any of us knowing.
There was no record of the three thousand two hundred dollars being deposited into our family’s account, and our monthly heating bill for the rental duplex was already overdue by one hundred and forty-two dollars.
I folded the statement and slipped it back into the plastic sleeve of the green ledger.
At five o’clock, Vicky came out of her room with her box of crayons and a sheet of construction paper.
She sat at the kitchen table across from me, her blue plush dog resting on her lap.
She began drawing three tall triangles with a brown crayon, pressing down so hard the paper creaked
