A Thief Amongst Us

My dad’s last two surgeries, months apart, brought about some interesting antics.  He always carried a lot of cash in his wallet–too much cash for his own good.  My sister Geri and I worried he’d be knocked in the head and robbed. And my mother worried the same thing, for decades. It was a terrible habit and I think it had something to do with all the many times he struggled for cash, so that when he had it, he wanted it with him.

Upon admitting Daddy for a heart catheterization, the hospital made sure Geri and I had taken all his belongings: watch, ring, wallet, keys, change.  We wouldn’t have dared suggest he leave them at home, because we had a healthy respect for his personal belongings.  He needed to hear someone in authority tell him to give them to us.

It was rare we ever saw exactly what was in there, he was so protective.  He would go to the other room or turn his back to retrieve bills he might need.  That evening, Geri decided to spend the first night with him.  I took his belongings home in a plastic bag and left them on his kitchen table.  Which was really my table, because he had moved into my house two years after my mother’s passing.  We had an island with stools in the kitchen, and a dining room table in an adjoining room, so the small table with four chairs was “his” table.

Once he came home and was recovering, my sister and I looked into the wallet and as expected, found a couple thousand dollars in it.  We decided to keep most of the bills in his money clip and put it safely away, and only keep $20-40 in his wallet.  After all, the only things he spent money on at this time were McDonald’s hamburgers with mustard.  He was no longer doing handyman work, and the money must have been leftover from one of his later jobs.

We hastily put the Kroger bag containing the money clip and bills on the top of a China cabinet near his table.  It was out of sight.  Or so I thought.  Every week I would ask him if he needed money.  When he pulled one of his chairs over to the China cabinet and started to climb upon it, heading for his money, I stopped him.

“No, I have some in my purse in my bedroom,” I said.  He never objected or admitted his money was up on that cabinet.  He let me go get him a $20 from my room.

There was no other explanation than he’d remembered he had a load of cash and we must have put it somewhere. He’d never asked us for it.  Therefore, he snooped around, climbing chairs, searching, until he found it.  I knew we had to put it somewhere else, because we couldn’t have him breaking his neck at 80-something, looking for his money.  I took it to my bedroom and put it in the bottom drawer of my nightstand and told my sister where I’d moved it in case she needed to get to it, for some reason.  We agreed we needed to put it into his bank account.

A few more weeks passed, and one morning, Daddy told me a blonde girl had come out of my youngest son’s room and gone into our sons’ bathroom.  He could see the hallway she traveled, from his recliner in his living room.  He said she looked right at him, and acted surprised to see him sitting there.

At first, I thought our son had come home and hadn’t stayed at his girlfriend’s parent’s house after all.  I questioned if it was Wyatt’s blonde girlfriend.  Daddy was positive it was not Kayla.

“No, she was taller than Kayla.  I’ve seen her around town before, but I can’t remember her name.”

At this point, I didn’t know what to think.  I went into the bedroom and no one was there.  I checked the window and it was not only unlocked, but the screen was out of the window and had been placed below the window.  Wow.  Was someone really in my house?

I checked the rest of the house, but found nothing out of order, so I called Wyatt to see if he’d told some friend in need she could stay in his room overnight.  He thought I was crazy.  It was quite the puzzle to all of us. Maybe Daddy had imagined the girl. He certainly was convincing, though.

Jim and I were flying to Venezuela a few weeks later, for the wedding of our exchange son’s sister.  I was rushing around packing and getting passports ready, and the night before the trip, I asked Daddy if he needed some money. 

“Yes, a little money would be good.”

I reminded him we would be leaving and Geri would be checking with him every day, putting his breakfast out and lunch in the fridge each morning and picking him up to go to her house for supper each evening.

I went down to my bedroom to grab a little money out of the money clip in the Kroger bag in my nightstand.  It was gone! I frantically searched.  Finally, I went to Daddy and asked if he had taken any money from my bedroom.

“No, Sis, I haven’t.  Do you have some missing?  Is it MY MONEY?” Experience told me not to further stir him up, to stay calm, and LIE.

“No, it was just a little bit of money I had in my nightstand; it’s okay, no big deal.” Whew, that was close.  He believed me.  But what the heck happened to that money?

I trusted everyone in my family, but I still had to ask, for my sanity.  No one had touched it or even knew about it. My sister had forgotten where I’d said I put it.

I had a lot of time to think about that missing money, and upon coming home from our trip, I turned my house upside down.  I was so afraid the blonde girl had taken it.  I found out a young, stringy blonde female had been arrested for breaking into houses a couple of miles across a few fields from us, and wondered if she was the culprit.  

I talked to a cousin who was a local police officer, to see what he thought.  He told me to call the county sheriff’s office and make a report. I did. But as I told my story about my dad seeing a stranger in our house and the missing money, I could tell the officer taking the report was unimpressed.  I expected someone to come to the house and see how the rooms were set up, take statements, look at the window, and maybe take some fingerprints.  Nope.  We were just out of luck.

Some months later, Daddy was to have cataract surgery.  As the eye center had him on the gurney ready for surgery, they again had him give us the contents in his pockets.  Before the double doors swung behind him, Geri had opened his wallet.  It felt strange to rummage into the wallet, but we felt we needed to know just how much he was walking around with, in his mid-80s.

“Wow, would you look at this!  Almost $2,000!” There in the wallet was his same money clip,  holding the $2,000 less two hundred dollars, that had been stolen.  He had stolen his own money! We believed then, the blonde girl was probably a hallucination from the many meds he was on.

This is a precious, funny, sad, and loving reminder of our dad.  We love to recount this story, because we have so much fun telling it.  We lose it early on in the story, and it continues on with a great deal of cackling.  And he would find it funny, too.

It is so precious to us, that I asked my sister if I could give the money clip to Daddy’s first born and first married grandson, my son Calen, as a wedding gift.  First, we had to retell the story for Calen’s bride-to-be. She already knew Daddy’s grandsons not only called him Paw Paw, but after they got a little older, they called him by his childhood nickname, Duck, after Donald Duck.  After they opened the box holding the worn, silver plated money clip that read: Calen  8-29-2015  Love, The Duck, there were tears, too.