While my husband was upstairs getting his knee scoped, his grown son slid an old iPad across the hospital cafeteria table at 11:40. For five years Travis had told everybody Jamie couldn’t read a word.

“Don’t sign Friday, Miss Curly,” Jamie whispered. “Daddy’s gonna take your money.”

He tapped the screen. I reached for my reading glasses with my hands shaking.

Everybody in Magoffin County calls me Curly. I set hair in Salyersville for forty-one years, before I ever married Travis Pruitt. I gave half the women in this county their first perm and the other half their last. Jamie is forty-one, was born with Down syndrome, and bags groceries at the IGA three mornings a week. Most nights, he beats me at Wheel of Fortune.

Travis always said Jamie was guessing at the letters. He said it to the preacher, the IGA manager, and anyone else who stood still long enough. I used to let the subject pass. I told myself Travis knew his son better than I did. That was easier than asking why he kept insisting Jamie couldn’t understand what was said around him.

The iPad was Travis’s old one, cracked at a corner with a county fair sticker on the back. It was still signed in to his phone account, so his texts appeared on it. Jamie had opened a message to someone saved as Sheila PCB.

“She signs the joint account Friday at 10,” Travis had written. “Once it’s joint, the bank can’t stop me moving it.”

Below it, Sheila had asked, “And the boy?”

Travis answered with two words: “Handled. Saturday.”

I set my glasses down on the tray. My coffee had gone cold and tasted burnt. “Jamie, honey, how long have you known?”

“Since summer.” He looked down at the table. “Daddy said if I tell, I can’t live with you no more.”

I wanted to ask why he had waited. I wanted to ask whether Travis had said anything else, whether Jamie had been scared every day since summer. What came out was, “You did right telling me.”

“I didn’t want you mad.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

The money was $310,000, every dime from selling Leroy’s Tire & Lube after my first husband passed. It sat in a CD in my name at the bank on Main Street, and it came due that month. Travis had asked me about it twice. I had taken those questions as interest in our future. By then, they sounded different.

Travis came down in a wheelchair at 1:15. He saw the iPad in Jamie’s hands and laughed out loud.

“Quit poking at that thing, son. It ain’t like you can read it.”

Jamie turned it face down on the table. I wanted to slap Travis. I did not. I had to keep my voice steady enough to hear what he said next.

“Don’t forget Friday at ten, Curly,” he said on the way to the truck. “It’s all for the boy, so he’s took care of when we’re gone.”

Jamie stayed beside me. Travis didn’t look back at him.

That night I opened the kitchen junk drawer where I kept my Medicare card and bank papers. The CD statement was gone. In its place was a joint account form, filled out in Travis’s handwriting, with a sticky note that said, “Sign here, hon.”

I called my sister Opal up in Ashland. I told her what Jamie had shown me, then what I found in the drawer.

“You cross him, and he’ll swear half that house is his,” she said. “Connie, you could end up with no roof over your head at seventy.”

“I know the CD is in my name.”

“That’s not what I said.”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about how quickly Travis had called it money for Jamie, and how easily he had spoken about moving it. Opal stayed on the line while I tried to make both things fit.

“Maybe I read it wrong,” I said finally. “Maybe he was talking big to somebody, and it really is for Jamie.”

“Then ask him where the money’s going,” Opal said.

I did. At supper on Wednesday, I passed Travis the cornbread and said, “Let’s not do joint. Let’s put the whole $310,000 in a trust for Jamie, and let Brother Dennis at First Baptist watch over it.”

Travis put his fork down.

“That boy don’t need $310,000,” he said. “He needs a bed somewhere and somebody paid to watch him.”

Jamie stood up and went to his room. I heard his door shut.

“Don’t talk about him like he isn’t here,” I said.

“He’s got a job and a place to live. He doesn’t know what money means.”

“He knows what you just said.”

Travis looked at me as if I were the one making things difficult. “We talked about the account. You said you’d sign.”

“I said we’d talk about it.”

“You’re making this into something it isn’t.”

I didn’t tell him about the iPad. I wasn’t ready to hear him lie to my face while I still needed to decide what I believed. So I said we would do it his way. He patted my head like I was a good dog.

Thursday morning I drove to the bank by myself. The teller was Kaitlyn Mullins, whose bangs I cut for twelve years. She lowered her voice when I got to the counter.

“Miss Curly, Mr. Pruitt’s called twice this week to make sure tomorrow’s still on.”

“Tomorrow at ten?”

She nodded. “That’s what he asked about.”

“Then let’s do my part today.”

I renewed the CD for five more years, in my name alone. I put Jamie down as the person it goes to when I die. Every line was mine to sign.

On Friday at ten, Travis hobbled into the bank on his crutches with the sticky note in his shirt pocket. I was there already. The banker pulled up my account, and his face changed.

“Mr. Pruitt, Mrs. Pruitt renewed this yesterday. It doesn’t come due again until 2031.”

Travis turned on me right there in the lobby.

“You dried-up old fool,” he said. “You’d take the word of a boy who can’t tie his own shoes over mine?”

I had spent the night before checking every line of the renewal in case I had misunderstood something. I was too worn out for tears.

“He ties his shoes just fine, Travis,” I said. “And he reads just fine. You never once sat down and listened.”

The banker didn’t join the argument. Travis looked at him, then back at me.

“You told me we were doing this together.”

“I changed my mind.”

“You changed it because Jamie showed you something.”

“Yes.”

Travis stared at the floor for a moment. Then he turned and left. Friday night he packed his truck. At six on Saturday morning, I heard it back out of the drive. He never said one word to Jamie.

At 8:05 somebody knocked. Jamie was at the table eating his cereal in his IGA shirt. I opened the front door, and a woman with a clipboard was standing on my porch. Behind her, a white van sat in my driveway with Riverbend Residential painted on the side.

“I’m here to pick up James Pruitt,” she said, kind as anything. She held the paper out to me. Under the line that said Reason for placement, in Travis’s handwriting, it said I could no longer care for Jamie and he needed residential placement.

I read it twice. Travis had arranged it. The reason he’d written was a lie.

The woman glanced at my face. “Are you Connie?”

“Yes.”

“I was told the family had agreed.”

“No one asked me.”

Jamie had come to stand behind me. He was still wearing his IGA shirt. The woman looked at him, then back at me, as if she were waiting for me to explain the words on the page.

“He lives here,” I said. “He works. He’s staying with me.”

She lowered the clipboard. “I can call Mr. Pruitt.”

“Please do.”

Jamie touched my sleeve. “Am I going?”

“No,” I said. “You’re staying here.”

The woman placed the clipboard against her side. “I don’t want to take him somewhere he isn’t meant to go. I’ll call Travis now.”

I asked her to wait a minute. I called Opal first and put her on speaker. She answered with, “What happened?”

I told her about the van and read the reason on the form. She went quiet, then said, “That’s what he wrote?”

“It’s his handwriting.”

The woman from Riverbend stood on the porch with us. Jamie listened from beside me. I called Travis and put him on speaker too.

He answered sharply. “What?”

“Riverbend is here for Jamie.”

There was a pause. “They’re supposed to take him.”

“Your form says I can’t care for him.”

“You told me you’d do it my way.”

“I told you that after you said he needed a bed somewhere and somebody paid to watch him.”

“I’m trying to make sure he’s taken care of.”

“Then why did you tell Sheila I was signing the account so you could move the money?”

He took a breath. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I saw the message, Travis. I read it myself.”

Opal spoke into the phone. “You wrote down that Connie couldn’t care for Jamie. You didn’t even ask her.”

“I was handling it,” Travis said. “I thought it would be better if Jamie had care, and the money could help pay for it.”

“The money isn’t yours to move,” I said. “And Jamie is not going.”

“That’s why I needed you to sign Friday,” he said. “Once it was joint, I could arrange things without you stopping every step.”

The woman from Riverbend looked down at her clipboard. Opal said nothing. Jamie was close enough to hear every word.

I asked, “You wanted him gone before you got my signature?”

“I wanted him somewhere he could be looked after. You don’t understand how much work it is.”

“I’ve lived with him. You’ve lived with him.”

Travis started to answer, stopped, then tried again. “I thought you’d see it was for the best.”

“No,” I said. “You thought I’d sign.”

He didn’t deny it. He said he had not meant to hurt anyone, then blamed me for turning a family decision into a fight. I told him there would be no joint account and no placement. He said I was making a mistake. I said the decision was mine.

The woman from Riverbend told Travis she would not take Jamie after I had refused. She did not argue with me or try to persuade Jamie. She thanked us for speaking with her, then left with the clipboard. The van backed out of the drive.

Opal was still on speaker. “Connie, do you want me to come down?”

“I’m all right,” I said. It wasn’t quite true, but I knew what I needed to do next.

Travis said he would come back to talk. I told him not to come back expecting me to sign anything. He said, “You can’t just decide I don’t get a say.”

“I can decide who gets access to my money,” I said. “And I can decide Jamie stays here.”

He hung up. I did not call him back.

Jamie went to the IGA that morning. Before he left, he asked if I was still angry with him.

“No,” I said. “I’m angry at your father. That isn’t the same thing.”

He nodded and went out the door.

Travis stayed gone. I kept the CD in my name, and Jamie stayed with me. I had spent years letting Travis answer for his son. I stopped doing that.