“There’s been a misunderstanding. The kid’s upset. College kids, you know.”
The caseworker walked past him into the laundry room. She saw the air mattress. The folded wheelchair. My mother’s swollen ankles.
Then she counted the pills in my mother’s prescription bottles.
Her pain medication was supposed to last thirty days. The bottle had been filled nine days earlier.
It was empty.
The deputies found the rest of the pills in Colt’s jacket. In my mother’s bedroom. Along with a list of names and phone numbers. He’d been selling them.
Colt was arrested that morning for theft of prescription medication and possession with intent to sell.
Lonnie was arrested that afternoon. Neglect of a vulnerable adult, financial exploitation, and attempted fraud.
The “lawyer” he’d taken my mother to wasn’t a lawyer. He was a notary who ran a tax prep business out of a strip mall. He was charged too.
The deed was declared void. My father’s trust held.
A judge granted my mother an emergency protective order. Lonnie and Colt were never allowed back in the house.
My mother filed for divorce from her hospital bed. She’d been dehydrated and had a urinary infection nobody had treated.
“I’m so ashamed,” she told me. “I let them do this to me. In my own house.”
“Mom,” I said. “You didn’t let anybody do anything. They took advantage of you. That’s what they do. That’s what I’m studying to stop.”
I took the spring semester off. I set up a home health aide through her insurance. I put a ramp on the back porch. I moved her back into her own bedroom, downstairs this time, in my father’s old office, with a big window over the garden.
In January, I transferred to the university here in Tucson. Closer to home.
