The Small Amounts That Went Missing Before the Cheque Reached Me

The Shoebox on the Kitchen Table

For forty-one years I taught small children to find middle C. I retired from the primary school here in Ontario a while back now, and for most of my marriage I left anything to do with money to Harold. That was not pride on his part or laziness on mine. It was simply how we divided the house. I knew where every recorder and every triangle lived. He knew where the paperwork lived, and the paperwork lived in a grey filing cabinet in the spare room that I rarely opened.

Harold died two winters ago, in February, which is the cruellest month to lose anyone in this part of the country because the ground is too hard to do anything quickly and you are left waiting indoors with your thoughts and the snow. In the spring I started the slow business of understanding what we actually owned. I carried a shoebox of statements down to the kitchen table, because the kitchen table was where I felt most like myself, and I made a pot of tea, and I began.

The shoebox held statements going back years. Most of it I understood well enough. There was the house, there were the savings, there was the small pension from the board. And then there were the shares.

The Shares We Bought Almost by Accident

I had almost forgotten about the shares. Years ago, long before either of us thought about dying, Harold had bought a small parcel of foreign shares. I remember the evening he decided to do it. We were doing the dishes and he was listening to a man on the radio talk about not keeping all your eggs in one Canadian basket, and Harold dried his hands and said, well, maybe we should own a little something from somewhere else. That was the whole deliberation. It was an afterthought, really, a few hundred dollars put into companies in countries I could not have found quickly on a map.

We never thought about them again after that. They sat there quietly for years, the way a plant in the corner of a room sits there, and every so often a statement would arrive in the mail and Harold would glance at it and file it in the grey cabinet and that was the end of it. I never once read one. Why would I? That was his department, and I trusted him completely.

So when I opened the shoebox at the kitchen table, these statements were almost like letters from a stranger. Except they were not from a stranger. They were covered in Harold's handwriting. He had the habit of writing little notes in the margins in that small, neat, slanting hand of his, the hand I had seen on forty-one years of birthday cards and grocery lists. Next to one figure he had written the single word tidy. Next to another, from an earlier year, he had written a question mark and then, underneath it, nothing. He had noticed something and then, I suppose, got busy and never came back to it.

The Line That Did Not Add Up

I am good with numbers in the way that a music teacher is good with numbers. I can count a bar of music in my sleep. So when I read the dividend statements properly, line by line, with my reading glasses on and the afternoon light coming in low across the table, something caught at me.

The company had paid a certain amount. I could see that plainly. But the amount that had actually come through to us was smaller. Somewhere between the company announcing what it would pay and the money arriving in our account, a slice had been taken. It was not a large slice on any single statement. A few dollars here, a slightly larger few there. But it was taken every single time, on every single payment, year after year, and when I began adding it up on the back of an envelope the way I used to tally marks for the school concert, it was not nothing. It was a real sum.

What I did not understand, sitting there, was why. The money had not gone to our own government here. It had been held back at the other end, in the country where the company had its home, before it ever crossed the ocean to me. I remember feeling faintly foolish, the way you feel when everyone else seems to have known something for years. This, it turned out, had a plain name. It is a thing called dividend withholding tax, and apparently it is a completely ordinary part of owning a share in a company based in another country. The country taxes the payment on its way out the door.

Phoning Someone Younger and More Patient

I did what a woman my age does when she reaches the edge of what she understands. I phoned someone younger. Her name is Priya and she used to live two doors down before she moved across the city, and she has the gift of explaining a thing without ever once making you feel small for not knowing it. I had her on speakerphone while I spread the statements out across the table like a hand of cards.

She listened to me read the figures out. Then she explained, slowly, the way I used to explain a time signature to a seven year old, that this slice taken at the far end is a form of dividend tax withholding, and that because Canada has arrangements with a great many of these countries, a retired person in my position may have been charged more than the agreements actually allow. The surprising part, she said, was the next bit. Some of what had been held back over the years might not be lost at all. It might be possible to ask for a portion of it back.

I made her say that twice. Through the kitchen window I could see the bird feeder Harold hung, and I thought about the little question mark he had drawn and never answered, and I felt oddly as though the two of us were finally finishing a conversation.

What I Do With the Statements Now

I will be honest. I have not become a different woman. I did not suddenly turn into someone who reads the financial pages over breakfast. But I have changed one small habit, and it feels like a large one.

When a statement comes now, I do not file it unread the way Harold used to. I sit with it at the table, with the tea, and I read it properly, and I look for that slice that gets taken before the money reaches me. I understand now that this quiet dividend withholding was not a mistake and not anyone being dishonest. It is simply how the world is built when you own a tiny piece of a company that lives somewhere else. The only mistake was never looking.

Priya helped me gather the older statements together and understand what, if anything, could be asked for from past years, and I am working through that slowly, in no hurry, the way you work through a difficult piece of music by practising it a few bars at a time. Some of it may come back to me and some of it may not, and either way I am no longer in the dark about my own household.

What stays with me most is not the money. It is the handwriting. It is the thought of Harold, standing in the spare room with a statement in his hand, noticing the same thing I noticed, drawing his small careful question mark, and meaning to come back to it. I came back to it for him. At the kitchen table, in the low afternoon light, with the recorder music of forty-one years somewhere behind me, I finally read what he had been filing all along. And I found, folded into those dry columns of figures, one more quiet thing he had left me to look after.