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“Fifty grand for a funeral?” I blurted out. Brandi made a choking noise. “What did you do? Buy a solid gold coffin?”
“Death’s expensive. If you wanted more of a say in the spending, you should’ve been here to help.” She gestured at the building. “Good luck. You’re gonna need it.”
“What the hell is her problem?” I asked as we unlocked the door and went inside. “She acts like it’s our fault our mother didn’t pay her.”
“You know how our mother was,” Brandi muttered. “She was poison. She infected everything she touched. Nadine’s lucky she wasn’t raised by her. Fifty grand. Add it to the list, I guess. Wow. Look at all of this.”
When we were children, our mother’s store was located on the other side of town. This location was new, but the interior felt the same as what I remembered from that other store. From the very front of the store to the back, tall shelves held long rolls of fabric of every color and design imaginable. The outer walls held even more rolls. There was an adjacent room to our right that was full of chairs, couches, and tables.
“It’s cleaner than I expected,” Brandi admitted.
“Nadine and the other employees must have been running the place up until the end,” I said. “Let’s check out the office.”
We found the office in the back corner. It was locked, but fortunately the same key that worked on the front door opened it. I flicked on the light, then cursed.
There was, presumably, a desk in the middle of the small room, but it was impossible to know for certain because it was covered in stacks of paper and swatches of fabric. More paper was stacked into messy piles on the floor, enough that it was almost difficult to walk inside. There was a very narrow pathway leading around the side of the desk to the office chair, which was also covered in paper. I picked up one of the sheets. It was an invoice for a chair that had been reupholstered in 2019.
“There’s the mother I remember,” Brandi muttered.
“And here I thought this would be easy.” I sighed. “That computer looks like it’s a decade old.”
“It’s the same one she used to have in her office in the house.” Brandi laughed bitterly. “For some reason, I imagined her embracing technology sometime in the past few years. I don’t know why I expected her to change.”
“Good thing I took an accounting class in college. Let’s move half of this out into the showroom. Then we’ll split up and start trying to figure out how business is doing.”
“Not great, based on her inability to pay her employees…” Brandi muttered.
“I’m choosing to be positive about all of this,” I said. “I bet we’ll find good news.”
“I’ll take that bet,” Brandi said as we got to work.
13
Alyssa
We split up and got to work sifting through all the documents. It was a mess, even more than we expected after seeing the condition the office was in. Our mother kept bookkeeping notes on blank sheets of printer paper, post-it notes, and yellow legal pads. We even found one note written on a napkin—cloth, not paper!—that read, “Jessica owes $470 for ten yards of A476B cloth.”
Making matters worse was the computer. It was still running Windows XP, and was password protected. After making a few guesses—like Duchess, her old dog’s name—we gave up and focused on the physical documents.
It was dark outside by the time we decided to call it a night, and we were no closer to understanding how our mother’s business was doing. We came back the next morning and worked for nine straight hours organizing papers into categories and getting a ballpark idea of the finances. But the picture didn’t look good.
“According to these credit card statements, she’s in a lot of debt,” Brandi said as we packed up to go home. “She has over a hundred grand worth of debt spread between three credit cards.”
“Is that including the Discover card?” I asked, retrieving one statement that I had found. “There’s another twenty thousand dollars on that.”
Brandi grimaced when she read the page. “I wasn’t including that, no. By the time we pay off all of this debt, there won’t be much of anything left from her life insurance.”
“We’ve got at least a hundred grand worth of invoices here,” I added. “If we can access her bank account, we can match them up against her transactions and figure out which ones are still unpaid.”
“And then what? Track down these people and get them to pay their bills?”
“I don’t have anything better to do. I don’t mind making phone calls if it means cash coming in.” I shrugged. “I did find one piece of good news! She owns this building outright. She doesn’t pay rent.”
“I guess that’s how she was able to float along for so long in the red,” Brandi mused.
“At least that’s one asset we can sell,” I said.
“Plus the insurance payout for the house fire,” Brandi added.
