Sherrill’s truck was still ticking in the parking lot of a bank two counties from our home when the teller in Dexter, Missouri slid a printout across the counter and told me my brother had already cashed every savings bond our father ever bought for my kids, six days after we lowered him into the ground.
I did not understand her at first. I had driven forty five minutes with a death certificate folded in my purse and a copy of the letters testamentary the lawyer had given me, expecting to ask a simple question about a lockbox. Instead a woman named nothing I will ever forget because I never got her name, in a cardigan the color of weak coffee, turned her monitor so I could see it myself. Redeemed. Every line. Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed, down a column that should have belonged to my son and my daughter and did not belong to anyone else alive.
“He had the letters,” she said, like that explained something, like that made it clean. “Executor letters. He said the estate needed the funds settled.”
I looked at the total at the bottom of that printout for so long the numbers stopped being numbers. Six thousand one hundred seventy five dollars and forty two cents. Eleven years of my father standing in line at Legacy Bank in Cape Girardeau with cash folded in his shirt pocket, buying a bond for my boy and a bond for my girl on every single birthday they ever had, gone in one visit to a bank he had never in his life set foot in, in a town he had never once mentioned.
I want to tell you what that felt like, standing there. It felt like finding out the floor under your kitchen table had been rotted through the whole time and you only found out because you finally leaned on it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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