The Legacy

My mother used to say, “Bad luck always comes in threes.” As I stood in her empty bedroom thinking about the last two months, she could not have been more right. My husband had injured his back at work over a month ago and was suffering while waiting for surgery to be scheduled. My hours at work had been reduced due to the economic downturn, and we were scraping by on his meager disability payments and my pathetic paycheck. Worst of all, Mom was gone.

As I stood in Mom’s bedroom doorway, I remembered when I found her. I was delivering her the usual weekly groceries when I found her asleep on her recliner with the television playing silently in the background. I quietly put the groceries away in order not to wake her. Something just did not seem right. Even with the television on, there was an eerie silence in the house. I walked over to Mom to check on her. There was no movement of her chest or her usual deep breathing sound. I touched her arm, and it chilled me to the bone. I gasped. She was gone.

In a daze, I called my sister. “Mom’s gone,” I stuttered on my phone when she answered.

“Where did she go?” LeeAnn asked inquisitively.

In tears, I cried, “No, she’s dead. Get over here!”

“Call 911, and I’ll be right over,” LeeAnn replied and hung up on me while I stood there with the vacant shell of a body that used to be my mother.

I remembered calling 911 and waiting outside for LeeAnn and the paramedics. Everything is such a blur, and I can hardly remember the details now as I stare blankly into Mom’s bedroom full of her belongings.

“What are you doing?” yelled LeeAnn from the kitchen. Her yell snapped me back into reality.

“I’m packing Mom’s pictures,” I yelled back while laying a layer of bubble wrap in the bottom of a box. Tearfully, I took down the picture that Mom had hung on the wall of herself, Dad, LeeAnn, and me. LeeAnn was probably about four years old in the picture, and I was just over a year old.

As I gently placed the picture in the box, I noticed a small black notebook taped on the back. It was paper thin and only had a couple of pages in it. I carefully pulled it off the cardboard backing of the picture so that it would not tear, and open the notebook to see what was inside.

In beautiful cursive handwriting, the following message was written:

“To my darling daughters, if you have found this notebook, then either I am being moved because I can no longer take care of myself, or I am no longer with you on this earth. In either case, please know that I have not left you in despair. Just like my parents who lived through the depression, I did not trust others. Make sure you look twice before getting rid of my belongings. Not everything is at it seems. You both are my loves and my legacy. Love in eternity, Mom.”

I choked back tears and yelled, “LeeAnn, get in here!”

“Now what?” I heard LeeAnn grumble from the kitchen. “I’m coming,” she replied.

When she stepped into the bedroom, I handed her the small black notebook. She opened it up, read it, and handed it back to me.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked eagerly.

“I don’t know. What should I think? Mom always seemed to scrape by and never spent any money on herself. I doubt there’s any money around here,” she replied shrugging her shoulders and turning around to leave the bedroom.

“But what if it was because she was leaving it for us? What if there is money here? We just don’t see it because, ‘Not everything is as it seems,’ like she had written.”

LeeAnn stood still with her back facing me. She had recently been through a crisis too. The economic downturn had put hardship on her family. Her husband had been laid off from work, and the burden of making ends meet was also placed on LeeAnn’s shoulders. We were two peas in a pod, and the pod had fallen apart.

“What have you packed so far?” I asked.

“Just the dishes and the silverware in the kitchen,” she replied, turning back toward me with a trace of tears in her eyes.

“Okay, we need to think like Mom,” I said as I brushed past LeeAnn and walked into the living room.

In the living room was a large glass curio cabinet with three shelves. On the bottom shelf sat an antique porcelain tureen bowl for soup with a cover and matching spatula. The ornate bowl was decorated with gold-leaf designs and had a cupid standing on each side. I opened the curio and pulled out the bowl and sat down on the carpet. Inside of the bowl, there was a layer of Christmas wrap.

“Well, at least it’s already for packing,” LeeAnn said while standing over me.

I carefully dumped out the contents out of the bowl and began tearing open the Christmas wrap. There were five straps of one hundred dollar bills sitting in the wrap.

Both LeeAnn and I gasped. Open-mouthed, LeeAnn sat down on the carpet beside me.

“No one else needs to know about this, LeeAnn,” I said in amazement. “We need to go through each and every item in this house carefully.” Still in shock, LeeAnn nodded her head in disbelief.

I looked over at Mom’s flowery couch that had a stuffed toy dog sitting on it that LeeAnn had bought her over a decade ago. Getting up from the floor, I walked into Mom’s sewing room and returned with a pair of scissors. Looking the dog over, I started cutting a small incision along the seam.

“Hey, what are you doing? I got that for her!” LeeAnn yelled at me.

“Look, the thread color is different along this seam than the rest of the dog,” I replied while holding the stuffed dog out to LeeAnn before returning to my cutting. Sure enough, there were loose hundred dollar bills stuffed into the dog’s insides. The look on LeeAnn’s face showed that reality had just dawned on her.

“Oh wow,” she replied while looking around the house. “We are going to have to go through everything.” I just stood there nodding my head.

We called our perplexed husbands and informed them both that we would be spending the weekend together in Mom’s house. Of course, they inquired if we needed their help, and we politely declined. For the next couple of days, we found money in the corsets of Mom’s creepy porcelain dolls, between the box springs and mattresses of the beds, taped to the underneath of pull drawers, in ceramic figurines, inside of couch cushions, and other weird and unusual places.

During the evenings, we ordered delivery of Chinese food and pizza, and during the day, we munched on the groceries that Mom had remaining in the house. We would take breaks and laugh about “old times” growing up together. I even reminded LeeAnn that the last time we had spent the night together was over three decades ago when my son was just three years old, and we all stayed over at her house watching movies.

“That seems like a lifetime ago,” she said.

“It was a lifetime ago. Look how many lives have been born and passed during that time. My daughters were born, and our parents and grandparents have died. Even a child of one of our relatives was born and died during that time,” I replied sadly.

A few minutes later, LeeAnn giggled and said with a smile on her face, "Do you know what all this reminds of?"

"No telling," I replied quizzically.

"Remember the Easter when Uncle John put a ten dollar bill around an egg and covered it with aluminum foil? When he told us there was a special egg with money, we only looked for that one egg."

"Yeah, I remember that. Cousin Debbie found it. At least now, we are both the winners," I replied with a wink while reminiscing the bygone days of our childhood.

On Sunday, we agreed that we must have found all the money hidden by Mom in every nook and cranny of the house. We had a packing box full of bills in different denominations.

“Guess we need to count it now, huh?” asked LeeAnn.

“I tried to keep track while we were going through everything but gave up,” I sighed.

After the end of stacking and counting, we determined there was one million, one hundred, thirty-five thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars in total. We stood in shock looking at each other.

“What are we going to do with all this money?” I asked LeeAnn.

“I’ll tell you what we are not going to do. We are not depositing at a bank. I had a friend who put a lot of money into his bank account from selling an antique car, and the IRS froze his bank accounts. He told me if you put over ten thousand dollars in the account, you have to fill out a form. It’s a red flag. The IRS thinks your embezzling money or something like that.”

“Good point,” I sighed. “Well Mom was able to hold on to it, then so can we. Each of us gets half along with whatever we get for her house and car. We’ll just get some sturdy house safes and use it sparingly like Mom did to pay bills and live comfortably. She wouldn’t want us to spend it foolishly.”

“Agreed,” replied LeeAnn. She reached out in hugged me. I realized then that it had been decades since we had a sisterly hug. I don’t even remember us hugging when our father had passed away twenty years earlier.

“Let’s get the rest of this stuff boxed up and see what we can sell or donate,” I sighed looking around the living room and then glancing over to LeeAnn. Tears were streaming down her face.

“I love you, my baby sister. You are the best present Mom ever gave me. Let our legacy be to spend more time together. I think that is what Mom wanted by doing what she did. It wasn’t about the money. It was about us being together,” she said reaching out and hugging me again. “Mom knew that by doing what she did with the money, we would be here, spending time together.”

“Time together with you, my sister, is the best legacy ever. Thank you, Mom.”