The sales associate hesitated, then said the man who picked the mattress was someone she’d seen before because he came in with the same woman several times. I asked her to describe him. She said he was tall, gray at the temples, and had a small scar near his left eyebrow. Then she went quiet and said she still remembered what he’d called the woman that day. “Honey.” I asked whether she’d heard his name. She said yes, because he’d signed the delivery paperwork himself after the woman showed her ID. She pulled up the old ticket, and there it was — the delivery address, the woman’s signature, and the man’s name. I knew the last name immediately. It was my husband’s. My husband had died in 2020.
I told her that wasn’t possible, and she asked whether I wanted her to check the older account records. There were three financed purchases under my name, all made after my husband died. A bedroom set in 2021, a washer and dryer six months later, and a mattress the following year. Every one had been delivered to the same house. Every application used my Social Security number. Every delivery had been signed by the same woman. I asked why nobody had ever called me about the missed payments. She said the account had always been current until recently, and then she looked at the screen and said something that made my stomach turn. The payments weren’t coming from the woman at the house. They were coming from a checking account that had been opened using my husband’s old information.
I drove home and pulled out the box where I’d kept his wallet, his death certificate, and the papers from the funeral. His old checkbook was still there. I checked the account number printed on one of the cancelled checks and compared it with what the furniture store had given me. They were different — but the routing number was the same. I called the bank and explained everything. The woman put me on hold, then came back and asked whether I’d ever opened an account at a branch in Tupelo in 2021. I said no. She said someone had opened one using my name, my husband’s old address, and a copy of my driver’s license. Then she asked me the question I couldn’t answer: who would have had a reason to keep my husband’s identification after his funeral?
I went back through the funeral paperwork that night. There was one form I had never looked at closely because the funeral home had told me it was only for releasing his personal effects. It listed everything they had returned to me — wallet, watch, keys, phone, wedding ring. But beside “identification,” someone had written released separately to family representative. I called the funeral home the next morning. The director pulled the original file and said the person who collected the identification had signed for it three days after the funeral. The signature wasn’t mine. Then he read the name from the form, and I had to sit down.
It was the name of the woman who had signed for the bedroom set.
I asked him whether he’d ever seen her before. He said she had come to the funeral home twice — once before the service and once afterward — and that she’d told everyone she was my husband’s daughter. I said my husband and I never had a daughter. The director went completely silent. Then he opened another page in the file and said, “Ma’am, there’s something else you need to know.” The woman wasn’t listed as his daughter on the death paperwork. She was listed as his emergency contact. And that form had been completed nine months before he died.
