The bank called about activity on my mother’s account. She’d been gone six years, and the account was supposed to be closed. Except it wasn’t. It had been frozen, which was different, and something had triggered a review in October. Somebody had made a deposit, not a withdrawal—a cash deposit of four hundred dollars at a branch in a town she never lived in. I asked whether they had footage, and the manager said there was a process and that she’d need my brother’s signature too.
My brother said no. He said it flat, in about a second and a half, and when I asked him why, he told me to leave it alone. That was the first time in six years he’d ever reacted that way when our mother came up. I asked if he knew about the account being frozen, and he said he didn’t. Then I asked why the bank would need his signature if neither of us had touched the account. He went quiet for several seconds before saying, “Because Mom didn’t close it.”
I called the bank again and asked them to explain what was happening. The manager finally told me the account had been placed on hold after a second deposit appeared, this one for exactly the same amount. Both deposits had been made at the same branch, exactly one month apart. She also said the person making them had asked the teller a question about my mother before leaving. I drove to the town the next morning and asked whether anyone remembered the deposits. The teller looked at the photograph of my mother I had brought and immediately said, “She came in here all the time.”
I told her my mother had never lived there, and the woman stared at me like I’d said something impossible. Then she pulled out a handwritten note someone had left with the account information. The handwriting wasn’t my mother’s, but I recognized the name written underneath it. It belonged to a man who had died nearly twenty years ago. I called my brother from the parking lot and asked him what our mother had been doing with that man. He didn’t answer the question. Instead, he finally admitted that six years ago, before our mother died, she had given him one instruction: if anyone ever started putting money into that account again, he was never supposed to tell me why.:::
