STATEMENT OF DISTRIBUTIONS.
Beneath the heading ran a column of dates and dollar amounts.
There were eleven lines, beginning the October after Grandma passed.
The final entry was dated the first week of September.
At the bottom, a bold line read: TOTAL DISTRIBUTED TO BENEFICIARY: $168,400.00.
The kitchen seemed to tilt, and I gripped the back of a chair.
“A hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars,” I said.
“I never received a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars.”
“You did,” Nick said quickly.
“It went into our joint account.”
“We needed it. We put it toward the house and the baby.”
“Our checking account has never held more than four thousand dollars.”
“You were exhausted after your grandmother d*ed,” he said.
His voice became gentle, slow, the voice you use on a frightened child.
“You signed everything, Anna. You just don’t remember. You were barely sl*eping.”
There it was.
The same sentence he had used about the clothes, wearing a different coat.
Beside the printed line for BENEFICIARY, someone had signed in blue ink, big and looping, with a long tail on the last letter.
Anna M. Keller.
I had never signed my name like that in my life.
“That’s not my signature,” I said.
“You were tired, Anna.”
“I don’t write like that.”
“Of course you do.”
Elaine drew her red pen from her handbag and clicked it once.
“Anna prints,” she said.
Nick stared at her.
“Mom—”
“I have watched this girl sign four Christmas cards, one baby-shower RSVP, and a birthday check, and every single time it was block capitals.”
“A. KELLER.”
She placed the cap of her pen on the paper and circled something.
“And whoever wrote this,” she said, “made the K like a man who was taught cursive by a woman who gave up correcting him in the third grade.”
She tapped the page.
