Her Final Step (Short Story)
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 
Guest Post by Richard Brawer
The Del Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation Park in Boca Raton, Florida which we had selected to place our mother after her stroke was not one of those Medicaid warehouses. It was more like a five star hotel, and charged like one, $1000.00 per day for a private room plus incidentals which added up to around $400,000 per year. However, our mother could afford it even if she lived the ten more years the doctors predicted. But she didn’t. She developed pneumonia and died in six months.
I was the businessman in the family so I was elected to handle our mother’s affairs, clear out her condo and put it up for sale, and go through the legal trials and tribulations of probating her will. When my wife and I went to Del Vista to settle my mother’s bill the director immediately blurted out, “We’re so sorry about Ethel. It wasn’t our fault.”
“No one is blaming you,” I had replied.
The Del Vista staff had done a wonderful job caring for her. Her stroke had attacked her upper body, leaving her unable to speak, unable to swallow and her left arm paralyzed, but she had no trouble walking. In the six months of rehab, they had her talking in short sentences, off the feeding tube and eating pureed food.
“We warned her not to walk so fast,” the director said. “If it weren’t for those shoes, she wouldn’t have fallen and broken her hip.”
“What shoes?” I asked.
“Ethel received a gift of leather soled shoes with a heel.” He held up his hand, his thumb and index finger about an inch and a half apart. “You know we only allow our residents to wear sneakers or rubber soled flat shoes. If we had caught it we would have taken them from her. But the package slipped through somehow.”
Suddenly something my doctor brother said leaped into the forefront of my mind. If she should fall and break something, at her age infections and pneumonia will kill her.
I looked at my wife who responded with a shrug.
I stood up. “Can I see the shoes?”
“Certainly.”
He led us to a storage room and opened a locker. My mother’s blouses and stretch-waist pants hung neatly on hangers. Those clothes were so not her. She had only shopped in Saks, Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus. However, at Del Vista pants had to have stretch waists, and all shirts had to be pullovers with loose necks for easy on and off, and everything had to be machine washable. That meant polyester clothes from Wal-Mart and Sears. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the trauma at having to wear such “rags” drove her to work harder toward her recuperation.
The shoe box rested on the bottom shelf. I pulled it out. The label read Ferragamo and it had a Saks Fifth Avenue price tag stuck on the end. Three hundred dollars. I lifted the lid and stared at the leather slip-ons.
“Nobody knew this was a shoe box?” I asked the director.
“Our receptionist said the lady who came to visit your mother brought a Saks shopping bag. Nobody checked to see what was inside.”
“There was no card or sales slip?”
“Not that we found.”
“And she was wearing these when she fell and broke her hip?”
“Yes. I’m so sorry.”
**********
Leaving the rehab center with the shoe box clutched in my hand, I drove directly to Saks Fifth Avenue. It was only a mile from Del Vista. I was adamant about going over there and finding out who sent the shoes. My wife tried to talk me out of it.
“Leave it alone,” she said. “What good will it do to find out? It can only cause you grief?”
I finally ended the argument by saying, “If you don’t want to come with me, I’ll drop you off and the condo and go myself.” She came, but wandered off to look at some dresses while I went to the shoe department.
I asked for Judy. My mother seemed to like to deal with the same salespeople and kept their names in her address book.
“Judy is on vacation,” the clerk told me.
“When will she be back?”
“She just left. I guess two weeks.”
Damn, we’ll be back in New Jersey by then.
**********
My brothers and our wives were gathered around the kitchen table in my house reviewing our mother’s estate.
“It looks like we’ll get a little over a million each after taxes,” I said.
“The best thing she ever did for us was die,” my brother, Kevin, said.
The smiles on their faces including my wife’s told me they were all probably thinking the same thing Kevin verbalized. I couldn’t help but wonder which one murdered her.
I’m Jerry. My wife is Diane. My brothers and sisters-in law are Kevin and Fran, the oldest, and Mark and Cindy, the youngest. Our mother’s death couldn’t have come at a better time for all of us.
Mark was a great orthopedic surgeon. Too bad he was also the poster child for the slogan, “doctors make lousy businessmen.” He had thrown away hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad investments in real estate and the stock market. For some reason he wasn’t satisfied with his high income as a doctor and was investing in get rich quick schemes. And Kevin and Fran had drained their savings taking care of Fran’s mother.
Not that Diane and I couldn’t use the inheritance also. We lived in New Jersey. My daughter and son-in-law lived in California. Their baby was due in two months. Diane continually moaned about how little she would see her grandchild. We had discussed buying a small vacation condo out there but concluded we didn’t have the money. Now we did.
“When will we get the money?” Kevin asked.
“As soon as her broker liquidates the bonds. I’d say in a couple of weeks.”
I dropped my eyes to the table and thought about the bill that came in the mail yesterday from Saks Fifth Avenue. The pair of Ferragamo shoes was the only item on it. Which one had sent them? Even though I had taken control of mother’s credit cards and check book, any of my brothers or sisters-in-law would have had no trouble getting her Saks card number. All they had to do was go through her files when they stayed at her Florida condo while visiting her at Del Vista and get the account information off a statement.
I blinked my eyes trying to vanquish the thought from my mind. Mother was gone and cremated. Cremation was her idea. She had specifically requested it in writing. Time to move on. Still, I couldn’t shake the need to know who did it. That was my hang-up. I didn’t like unfinished business and obsessed over it until I completed the job. Some say that was a good trait. Others maintain it led to a needless obsession. Well, obsessive compulsive behavior was a family trait inherited from our mother. Hers was for clothes.
Mark broke me away from dire thoughts. “What’s in the bag, Jerry?”
“The bag? Oh, yeah. Things I want to show you. You won’t believe it until you see it for yourself.”
I reached in the bag, pulled out a stack of checks and flipped them on the table. They fanned out like a deck of cards.
“What are those?” Fran asked.
“Gifts she was going to give to salespeople at her favorite stores.”
“What?” Cindy asked.
“You heard me. I found them in her address book. Based on the dates it looks like they were supposed to be Christmas gifts.”
“There must be a couple of grand here,” Mark said.
“Try $3500.00.”
Fran scowled, “She gives thousands to strangers and twenty-five dollar birthday gifts to her grandchildren.”
“Dumb shit,” Kevin scoffed.
That she was, I thought and presented two faded sales records from an auction house. “This is where her jewelry, silver, china and antiques went. She sold them all.”
“Let me see that,” Mark said.
I slid the documents across the table.
He studied them for a moment, and scowled, “And she got peanuts for them. That six piece sterling tea service was a genuine Revere from the seventeen hundreds. It had to be worth thousands. It says here she got fifteen hundred.”
“You’d think she would want to leave some of those things to her grandchildren for them to remember her by,” Fran said.
Kevin scoffed and said, “You have to be fucking kidding. You know her only interest in us was how we reflected on her.”
“She used the money she got from selling her stuff to buy more clothes,” I said.
“How do you know?” Mark asked. “I thought she had a big income from the trust.”
“After income taxes, paying her condo mortgage and fees, renting chauffeured cars to drive her everywhere, and obviously tips and gifts to buy people’s adoration she came up a bit short.”
“You saw her closets,” Diane said. “She lived alone in that three bedroom condo and every closet was filled with her clothes. She used one just for shoes. She must have had forty pairs, most of them Ferragamo.”
Hearing the name, Ferragamo, the murder weapon, I snapped my head around and stared straight at Diane. Whoever had called the shoe department to order those shoes from Judy couldn’t say she was Mrs. Collins because Judy would probably have known mother’s voice. Yet to charge them on mother’s account the person would have had to give a name. Explaining mother was in a nursing home and that the shoes were to be delivered to her would have been sufficient reason for Judy to accept the use of mother’s charge card. I’ll bet Judy was the one who actually delivered the shoes. Was the reason Diane wandered off when I went to the shoe department because she did not want to meet Judy face to face because she was afraid Judy might recognize her voice as the one who ordered the shoes?
I put that horrible thought out of my mind, refusing to believe it for even a split second. But I couldn't help but think she did know who ordered the shoes. Diane and her sisters-in-law are constantly on the phone with each other, sometimes two or three times a day. Did they all plan it together? Did Diane know who actually made the call? She was very distraught at the prospect of not being able to spend a lot of time with our coming grandchild.
“Show them the book,” Diane said, drawing me away from those horrendous thought.
I dragged my eyes from her, searched in the bag again and drew out a tattered book with the padded blue cover. Thrusting it out at her, I said, “Here.”
“What’s that?” Cindy asked.
“Mother’s high school year book from 1932,” Diane said. “Guess what her only activity was?”
Cindy shrugged.
“President of the Dress Committee.
“Get out.”
Diane flipped open the book to where she had placed a bookmark. “Read it for yourself.”
The book circulated around the table. When Cindy got it, she said, “She was a pretty teenager.”
“But one whose addiction started in high school and grew ever larger,” I added, extracting the Saks’, Bloomingdales’ and Neiman Marcus’ statements from the bag. As I spread them out on the table I let my eyes linger on Diane for an extra second and then looked around at the rest of the family. No one showed the faintest facial expression that might admit guilt.
“Her bills for this past year added up to $75,000.00,” I said.
“You have to be fucking kidding,” Kevin repeated.
For a professor Kevin didn’t have much of a vocabulary except for the four letter words. I guess being on the computer all his life doing math equations didn’t help him get one.
**********
The next morning I said, “I’m calling Saks.”
“Why, Jerry?” Diane asked. “What purpose will it serve?”
I ignored her and dialed the number my mother had in her address book.
Diane turned on the TV and put up the volume a bit louder than necessary.
“Shoe department, please,” I said to the operator. Then to Diane, “Turn that down, I can’t hear.”
“Why do you want to do this, Jerry?”
“Because I have to know.”
She clicked off the TV, said, “Will your mother ever leave us in peace?” She stormed out of the room.
“Is Judy there?” I asked to the voice that came on the line.
“I’m Judy.”
I introduced myself and told her my mother had passed away.
“Oh my goodness. I knew she was in the nursing home. What happened?”
“How did you know she was in a nursing home?”
“I hadn’t heard from her in a while. I called her home and never got an answer―”
Looking for your Christmas present? I thought.
“Then I saw someone from her complex who told me what happened. I called your mother to see how she was doing. She couldn’t speak very well, but she did order a pair of shoes. I charged them to her account and delivered them myself.”
I slowly hung up the phone and went to find Diane. I hugged her and told her what Judy had said.
She said, “We should have spread her ashes outside a Saks store instead of on your father’s grave.”
Richard Brawer is the author of Beyond Guilty a high concept thriller where a wrongly convicted woman escapes from death row and fights to prove her innocence, and the development of the latest nanotech drug that has the potential to virtually wipe out all disease.
After graduating the University of Florida and a stint in the National Guard, Richard worked 40 years in the textile and retail industries. He spends his retirement years writing novels, sailing and gardening. He has two married daughters, one granddaughter and lives in New Jersey with his wife Ruth. His website address is www.silklegacy.com
Reader Comments (1)
Thanks for a good story that could be read in one sitting, one that neatly disguises itself as a blog posting on nursing home care and families, and quickly establishes the mystery/investigation interest as well as the different characters.