Musings of the Night Nurse [3]: The Accountants
A series on caretaking my mom as she nears the end while fighting off the entities who prey on the old
It is summer 2021 and your mother’s desk is a mess, including some half-opened envelope shoved in the back of a drawer from the IRS.
“Mom?” you ask. “Did you pay your taxes this year?”
Your mother is not sure but answers something about L. taking care of it. You have never met L., the accountant your mother has used for decades. Other than her saying nice things about him, you know nothing about L., other than what he told your mother when she’d made a $35,000 loan to your husband’s business in 2015.
“Children never pay you back,” he’d said. When the loan was paid in full, you’d asked your mother to mention as much to L. You doubt she did. Not because there were as yet memory issues but because money is both a thing your mother fancies herself good at and a thing she does not keep track of.
You decide, in summer 2021, to contact L. directly. No, you are told, your mother’s taxes were not done this year, nor last. Which seems strange to you - wouldn’t L.’s office have reminded your mother to remit tax documents? Then again, maybe they did. Maybe she squirreled the papers away, papers you would not have thought to look for but are thinking, now, that you should have.
“They love me,” your mother had said, of the attorney and accountant of her late third husband W. And yet there were issues with the several hundred thousand dollars worth of farming equipment W. had left your mother, and would you accompany her to the lawyer’s office? And so in January 2013, a month after W.’s death, you drive through the snow to a small building in upstate New York. The office has a low ceiling and rough hewn walls. Were there a wood stove in the corner, it might feel cozy. The lawyer and the accountant standing astride his desk look surprised that you have come. The lawyer has a Quaker beard. The accountant looks like Ichabod Crane. Your mother starts to chitchat, and by her ease you can see she expects effusion, or at least the consideration afforded a recent widow. You detect neither. You see the impatience of two men who thought this was going to be an easy play, two men who grew up with W. and who see your mother, who has lived part-time in the area since 1968, as the city-lady, a lady who will not know the value of snow-plows and tractors and will presumably have no issue signing them away to an interested third party.
You ask the lawyer to explain the document to you as if you were stupid. He offers an opaque explanation you can see your mother is following not at all, and that this is the point. When you ask to read the document, the lawyer looks as though you’ve just asked him to be punched in the face by George Foreman. You insist. Ichabod does an abbreviated duck-and-weave when you ask why on earth your mother would sign a document giving up hundreds of thousands of dollars of farm equipment. Quaker takes the papers back and says, they’re not important. A week later, when you are not around, they call your mother back into the office, where she signs the papers. When you ask why she did this, she says it is because she trusted them; that when W. was dying, Quaker had married them in his hospital room.
Which tells you, in summer 2021, that you should have been paying better attention to your lovely, funny, trusting mother. That there are sharks circling, some of them in country offices, some in glass office towers in midtown Manhattan, where, soon, you will sit in a conference room with people who claim to be looking out for your mother, who have practice at laying the traps very carefully…
