Family Fortune: Steemhouse Writing Prompt

Grandpop died without telling anyone where he hid the money. None of us would have known about it at all if Nana hadn’t torn the house apart over the past forty years trying to find it. Some of my cousins whispered that obsessing over a cookie tin full of cash is what made her go crazy. Best I could tell, she was just forgetful. Not crazy. Crazy people lost touch with reality. Nana created her own reality. And it only made us crazy, not her.

“I hope it doesn’t snow.” Darcy, the only other granddaughter besides me, let the living room drapes fall back into place as she turned away from the window. “Can’t find jack shit if it does.”

I looked up from where I sat cross-legged on the floor, nailing the baseboards back in place after Nana’s midnight treasure hunt. “Metal detectors don’t work in the snow?” Dumb question, but I had to ask it.

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Of course they do. But all that extra digging? The dirt’s enough, thank you.”

“Hey, I’ll dig in the snow if it means I find all that money.” My other cousin Kevin flopped onto the sofa and scattered crumbs everywhere. He ignored the mess and took a bite of the pastry he’d swiped from the kitchen, his cheeks puffing out like a ground squirrel.

“I’m not looking for the money.” Darcy glowered at him. “Fort Necessity, you ass wipe. We’re supposed to go there tomorrow and look for stuff, if it doesn’t snow.”

Kevin gulped down his first mouthful of pastry. “We?”

"Not you. Dad and me. It’s why he got me this for Christmas.” Darcy patted the metal detector propped against the wall beside the window. “As long as it doesn’t snow.”

Being the oldest and presumably more grown up, I should have known better. But I had to say it. Couldn’t help myself. “This is Pennsylvania. It always snows.”

“You’re so full of crap, Leann.” Darcy stomped out of the living room and up the stairs, leaving her precious metal detector alone by the window.

I shot a look at Kevin. “Don’t you dare.”

He shrugged, all innocent. Like he really hadn’t thought about grabbing Darcy’s metal detector and sneaking out to the back yard with it.

I saw them every Christmas, these cousins. Mom’s sister and brother brought their families to Nana’s for the holidays. They stayed a week, then left and only existed on Facebook until the next December.

Mom’s other brother, the one in Nevada, sometimes sent his love.

The shriek of a banshee broke the quiet. “Noooo!” A moment of silence, then a second screech peeled the innocence from Kevin’s face like a bad layer of paint.

“What?” He sat up straight.

I closed my eyes and shook my head, hoping the gesture would convey what words couldn’t--it’s nothing. This is them. It happens all the time. Ignore it.

“You’re trying to kill me!” Another howl, my mother’s voice muttering something I couldn’t understand, and a few loud thumps. “Shame on you for torturing an old woman like this!”

“Do they need help?” Kevin swallowed hard, his throat moving like his last bite of pastry was trying to come back up.

“No.” I sighed. “This is what they do.”

A door overhead creaked open and Darcy’s voice drifted down the stairwell. “Is she hurting her?”

In the quiet space inside my head, I shifted the subjects of those pronouns back and forth like one of those old number slide puzzles from birthday parties when I was a kid.

“Nobody’s hurting anybody,” I said. “It’s fine.”

The upstairs door slammed shut.

Sofa cushions squeaked when Kevin stood. He gave me a wide berth as he made his escape, eyes round as he stared at me like it was my fault that Nana was yelling.

Whatever.

I followed the sounds of distress into Nana’s room, where Mom was trying to stop Nana from throwing her toothbrush on the floor. White globs of wet powder stuck to the front of Nana’s nightgown as well as her chin, where it swirled with a mix of spit. Baking soda? Toothpaste? What was left of Nana’s crushed high blood pressure pill?

“Nana, wait--” I stepped between her and Mom, plucking the toothbrush from Nana’s flimsy grip. “Look! It’s Nemo.” I pointed to the orange and white cartoon fish molded in textured rubber on the toothbrush handle. “See Nemo? You like Nemo. You don’t want to throw him on the floor.”

Nana grabbed for the toothbrush but I held it high, out of her reach. Behind me, bedsprings creaked, tattletaling about Mom’s collapse of defeat on the edge of the mattress.

“Here.” I put a fresh strip of baking soda toothpaste on the bristles and showed it to Nana. “Will you brush for me?”

Docile, meek as a small child, Nana took the handle of the toothbrush from my hand and brought it toward her mouth. At the last second, she jabbed it toward me like a knife, smearing the paste over my lips and banging the plastic against them so hard I felt sure it cracked a tooth.

“Shit!” I grabbed the toothbrush from her and moved away, checking the back of my hand for blood as I blotted my face. “Why are you so goddamned mean?”

Nana laughed, a cackling sound through shrunken lips, spittle foaming at the corners of her mouth. She pointed a gnarled finger at me to make it clear who it was she found so funny.

I glanced at Mom. Like me, she wasn’t smiling. At the same time, her expression registered no dismay or shock at Nana’s outburst. She wouldn’t look at me, motionless as a pillar of salt on the edge of the bed.

“Jesus.” I threw the toothbrush on the floor myself and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind me.

* * *

Darcy and her Dad came back from Fort Necessity empty-handed except for some twentieth-century coins they found scattered near the parking lot. They totaled about sixty cents.

In the living room, Nana sat in her power-lift recliner, rolled stocking tops visible below the hem of her skirt.

“Davis and me.” She pointed to a framed photo on the wall, a candid shot blown up to eight-by-twelve and just clear enough for me to tell who was in it.

Not that I didn’t already know a thousand times over.

“Davis,” she said again, and smiled.

Good lord. She had the face of an angel when she did that.

I sat on the opposite end of the sofa from her, brushing off stray crumbs from Kevin’s pastry the night before. “I know, Nana. You and Davis.”

Today was a good day. She could remember names.

Dementia had come on slowly. Only this past year had she started getting lost in her own house, busy pulling up floorboards one minute, pissing down her own legs the next because she couldn’t find the bathroom. Mom and I would nail the floorboards back in place, she’d forget about them for a few days, then pull them up and look under them again. A month ago she’d started taking bricks out of the fireplace, every one that she could wiggle loose.

“Davis.” She repeated, like saying his name over and over would make him forget the awful names she’d called him when he was twenty, when he refused to follow his father into the coal mines and left for college on the West Coast instead.

Disappointment. Waste of air. Traitor. Bastard, even, and Nana swore it was true.

“Your father couldn’t possibly produce something that worthless,” she’d said to my mother more than once. “The milkman must’ve come and got me while I was sleeping.”

All the doctors said that dementia could cause personality changes, radical swings from one disposition to the other. It would sometimes be so dramatic that family would barely recognize the person their loved one became.

So far, it hadn’t happened with Nana.

“That’s my boy.” She was still pointing, smiling like she couldn’t remember all the times she’d said she despised him.

“Yes, Nana. That’s your boy.” The one who left.

The front door opened and Mom came in from outside, a dusting of snow on her beanie. “Whew!” She plopped several shopping bags into a living room chair and shrugged out of her coat. “Getting cold out there.”

“Did you get milk?” I asked.

She plucked the beanie off her head, leaving her short hair poking out in all directions. “Yes. And orange juice with calcium. This vegan thing...Darcy’s hard to cook for.” Then she frowned, her attention drawn by something outside the kitchen window. “What are they doing out there?”

“Kevin made Darcy take the metal detector. They’ve been at it for a couple hours.”

“At what?”

I grimaced. No point even saying it.

“Oh.” Creases formed at the corners of Mom’s mouth. She turned away from the window and put a hand on Nana’s shoulder, speaking loudly near her ear. “Need to use the toilet, Mama?”

“No.” Nana grabbed Mom’s hand and shoved it away.

“Mama. It’s been a few hours. Can you at least try?”

Nana made a shoving motion and growled, not unlike a feral cat. “Mind your own damn business.”

“Mama, it is my business if you pee on yourself and I have to clean you up.” Mom reached for her arm, gentle, but firm. “Come on. Just try. Please?”

Nana’s fingers became claws and she dug them into Mom’s hand, jerking Mom toward her. Mom stumbled, then tugged her hand free and yelped. “Ow! Stop it, Mama. I’m just trying to help you.”

“Stop it!” Nana mocked her with a shrill, singsong voice. “Stop it right now. Stop it, stop it, you useless whore. Got yourself knocked up and then stayed in my house so you could live off my money. I know you. I know you.”

The back door banged open with enough force to make Mom and I both jump. I half-stood and whirled, watching Darcy and Kevin storm into the house in a swirling mist of snowflakes and water droplets.

“Look! Look!” Kevin held their treasure up with both hands, something brown and dirty with what might be broken roots hanging off it. “Look what we found!”

“What is that?” Covering her injured hand with her other palm, Mom moved around the arm of the sofa for a closer look. A trickle of blood dripped through her fingers.

I stepped between her and my two cousins to block their view of Mom’s hand. “Yeah--what’d you find?”

Darcy grinned from ear to ear. “Pretty sure it’s a cookie tin. But the lid is rusted shut.”

Cookie tin? Ooooh, boy.

Mom brushed past me, headed toward the kitchen. “Hang on. I’ll get something to open it.”

I caught her eye and wiggled my hand so only she could see me do it. She hesitated, glanced down at her own hand, then sucked in a sharp breath and shoved her closed fist into a wad of loose shirttail. A quick, private nod of thanks, and she disappeared around the edge of the doorway.

“Is that what I think it is?” Darcy pointed to the box Kevin held.

“How should I know?” I moved in for a closer look. Cookie tin was a good guess. I could tell it was metal. Rust had completely obscured anything that might have been painted on the sides and eaten clean through in places. I tried, but I couldn’t see anything through the holes.

“Here.” Mom returned with a flathead screwdriver and a hammer. She’d wrapped a dishtowel around her hand. “This should work.”

Not until her hand stopped bleeding, it wouldn’t. I reached for the screwdriver and she gave it to me like that had been her intention all along.

My cousins and Mom stood in a semi-circle around me while I knelt on the floor and started poking at the box. It didn’t take long. The rusty lid popped in half when I pried it upward, sending particles of rusty metal and dirt skittering across the floorboards.

At first, nobody said a word. Kevin shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Mom folded her arms and sighed.

Coins glinted in the box, having been partially protected through the years by the stacks of paper Grandpap had placed on top of them. The paper had long ago decayed, but there was no doubt it had been paper, not the linen of printed money. One of the larger coins on top bore the distinct imprint of a company logo, the mine where he’d spent the last thirty years of his life before a falling kettle bottom crushed his spine.

“Well,” Mom said. “That settles that.”

“Is it worth anything?” Kevin asked.

“The right collector might give us a few bucks for it.” Mom almost smiled, but it was fleeting and passed so quickly it could have been a trick of the light. “Might bring a dollar or two on ebay. Depends on how rare scrip from that particular mine is.”

Behind her, Nana let out a cry. She had spotted the box and launched herself halfway out of the recliner before I caught her. I forced her to take a step backward until she had no choice but sit back down. She hadn’t been steady on her feet for years. That was the last thing any of us needed, her to fall and break a hip.

“That’s mine!” She shouted. “Give that to me.”

“Yeah?” I faced her straight on. “And what if we don’t?”

She howled in outrage, the harsh, keening sound of a person in physical distress. Her fingers dug into the upholstery on the recliner’s padded arms so hard her knuckles turned white.

“Why are you so goddamned mean?” My words from the night before, tossed back at me like they were her own. “Torturing an old woman this way!”

“Just give her the box,” Darcy said, spots of color dotting her cheeks. “Let her have it.”

I didn’t move. Just stood there, wondering what would happen if I refused to do what I was told.

“Leann, what’s wrong with you?” Kevin poked my shoulder, hard. “Why are you just standing there?”

Nana’s sunken lips trembled. “Because she’s just like her Mama. Always taking what don’t belong to her.”

A thousand words hovered on the end of my tongue. Who took what from whom? Who was the real thief here, the emotional vampire who sucked the life out of her entire fucking family?

“Fine.” Mom scooped the cookie tin full of Grandpop’s family fortune off the floor. She didn’t look at me when she dropped it in Nana’s lap. “All yours.”

The thoughts died unspoken. I turned and headed up the stairwell to my room without saying a word.

* * *

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