The volunteer fire department did a mailing about the new tanker and included a list of donors from the past ten years. We’re outside Elizabethton, Tennessee. My husband gave a hundred dollars every Christmas until he passed, and I’ve kept it up. I found our name every year, but underneath 2019 there was a memorial gift for five thousand dollars, given in his memory. He didn’t die until 2021, so I called the chief and asked if the year was wrong. He said it wasn’t, and that they’d been surprised when the check arrived because nobody knew what the gift was for.
The chief said the check came with a note, and he’d kept it because it was strange. He read it to me over the phone, and it said the gift was in memory of a person whose name I didn’t recognize, followed by the words, “The family will understand.” I asked him to look at the check again. He said it was signed by my husband, dated in 2019, and drawn from an account I had never seen. I told him my husband only had our joint checking account and a small savings account, so the chief said he’d make a copy of everything and leave it at the station for me.
I picked it up the next morning. The account number on the check belonged to a bank in Johnson City, and the signature was unmistakably my husband’s. I called the bank and asked if they could tell me when the account was opened. They couldn’t give me much, but they said it had been active since 2017 and that my husband was the only person listed on it. Then the woman asked if I wanted to know the mailing address on the account. I said yes. She read it twice because she thought she’d misheard it. It was the address of a house my husband and I had sold in 2006 — and the current resident had been receiving statements there in his name for almost eight years.
