I remember the first winter after Dad died. My mother called me crying because her furnace had failed and the house was fifty degrees inside. I called Mark first. “Ellen, I’d love to help, but we’re putting a new roof on the house this month,” Mark said over the phone. He sounded so breezy, like he was telling me about a golf game.
Todd didn’t even answer his phone. He sent a text three days later saying he was out of town. And Kevin just laughed and said he was overdrawn at the bank. So, I paid the $4,200 for the furnace. I dipped into my savings, the money I had set aside from twenty years of pinching pennies, driving my old Buick LeSabre with the rusted door panels, and clipping coupons at the kitchen table every Sunday.
That furnace was just the beginning. It became a routine. Every month, my mother’s small Social Security check would run out by the fifteenth. She would call me, her voice trembling, talking about how the grocery store clerk had looked at her funny when her card didn’t have enough funds.
I bought her groceries. I paid her real estate taxes. I bought her prescription heart medication and her winter coats. I even paid for her cable television because she said the silence in the house made her feel like she was already d*ad. My brothers knew I was doing it. They would show up for Thanksgiving, eat the turkey I bought and roasted, and tell Mom how great she looked. “Ellen is a saint,” Todd would say, patting my shoulder while he drank a beer I had paid for. But when the dinner was over, they would pack up the leftovers and leave without offering a single dollar. By 2018, my mother’s health took a sharp turn. She needed major knee surgery, followed by six weeks in a private rehabilitation facility. The insurance didn’t cover the full cost of the facility, and the bill came out to $32,000. I called a family meeting at my house. We sat in my small living room, the one with the worn carpet and the old standing fan. “We need to split this,” I told them, placing the rehabilitation bill on the coffee table. “I can’t do this alone anymore. I’ve already spent over a hundred thousand dollars over the last six years keeping Mom in her house.” Kevin looked at his phone. “I’ve got child support, Ellen. I can’t spare a dime.” “My eldest is starting college next year,” Mark said, looking out my window. “We’re tapped out.”
