Seven appointments in fourteen months. That number sat in my head the whole drive to the optometrist’s office on Meridian, and I kept trying to make it mean something smaller than what it probably meant.

Mother had been living with me and Gloria since Dad passed in March of 2021. We split the work. I handled the bills and the grocery runs. Gloria managed the calendar and the medications. Mother got $1,920 a month from Social Security and Dad’s railroad pension, and between the two of us, her care was running about $640 every week.

That covered the prescriptions, the adult daycare three times a week, the incontinence supplies, and the part-time aide who came Tuesdays and Thursdays so Gloria and I could both work our jobs.

I thought we had it under control. I really did.

Mother had been complaining about her eyes since the previous summer. She said the television looked fuzzy. She said the hallway seemed darker than it used to be. She said colors looked dull, like someone had turned the brightness down on the whole house. I kept telling her it was normal aging, that everybody’s eyes get worse after seventy. Gloria said the same thing. The optometrist sent reminder cards. Gloria told me she’d rescheduled because Mother wasn’t feeling well, or because the appointment time didn’t work, or because the weather was bad.

Fourteen months. Seven cards.

The thing that finally made me take her in myself was the gray comment.

Mother was sitting at the kitchen table one morning in October, and she looked around the room and said the whole thing looked like an old photograph. Not black and white, but close. She said it looked like the room was covered in a thin layer of dust even though I’d just cleaned two days before. I told her I’d make an appointment. Gloria said I was overreacting, that Mother was just being dramatic because she wanted attention.

I called the optometrist anyway. I took a half day off work. I drove Mother to the office myself.

The receptionist was a woman named Wanda who’d been there as long as I could remember. She pulled Mother’s file and flipped through it, and then she asked me to wait a second. She went into the back and came out with a small stack of appointment reminder cards held together with a paperclip. She laid them on the counter in front of me.

“Every one of these was canceled,” Wanda said. “Not by your mother. By someone else.”

I looked at the cards. The first one was from August of the previous year. The last one was from three weeks ago. Each one had a handwritten note on the back. Canceled by daughter, 8/17/23. Canceled by family, 10/4/23. Canceled by daughter Gloria, 12/19/23. The handwriting changed from card to card, so I knew Wanda wasn’t the only person who’d taken the calls. But Gloria’s name was on three of them.

I didn’t say anything. I just put the cards in my purse and walked Mother back to the exam room.

Dr. Pruitt had been our family’s optometrist since I was in high school. He was in his mid-sixties now, gray around the temples, still steady with his hands. He did the usual exam, had Mother read the chart, shined lights in her eyes, looked through the machine with all the lenses. Then he leaned back and asked what medications she was taking.

I pulled the bottles out of Mother’s purse. There were six of them. I read the labels out loud. Lisinopril for blood pressure. Atorvastatin for cholesterol. Metformin for blood sugar. Levothyroxine for her thyroid. Aspirin. And then the last one, a bottle I didn’t recognize, labeled only with Mother’s name and a dosage. No drug name I could pronounce.

Dr. Pruitt’s pen stopped moving. He set it down on the counter and held out his hand. I gave him the bottle.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me.

“How long has she been taking this?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Gloria handles the pills.”

“This medication can damage her vision,” Dr. Pruitt said. “It’s used for certain types of dementia, but it has serious side effects. It can cause cataracts. It can damage the optic nerve. If she’s been on it too long without monitoring, the damage can be permanent.”

I felt my knees go soft. I sat down in the chair next to Mother. She was looking at me, and her face had that confused expression she got when she knew something was wrong but didn’t understand what.

“Who prescribed this?” I asked.

Dr. Pruitt looked at the bottle again. “Dr. Feldman. He’s a neurologist. Does your mother see him?”

“No,” I said. “She’s never seen a neurologist.”

Dr. Pruitt was quiet. Then he opened Mother’s file and pulled out a piece of paper. It was a consent form. My signature was at the bottom, dated eleven months ago. The form said I acknowledged that Mother was starting a new medication for memory support and that I understood the risks.

I’d never seen it before in my life.

“I didn’t sign this,” I said.

Dr. Pruitt looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, very gently, “The signature looks like yours.”

It did. It looked exactly like mine. But I knew I hadn’t written it.

Mother reached over and put her hand on my arm. Her fingers felt cold.

“Why didn’t you listen when I said the room looked gray?” she asked.

I didn’t have an answer.

Dr. Pruitt said he wanted to run more tests, but based on what he could see, Mother had significant damage to both optic nerves. He said if she stopped the medication now, her vision might stabilize, but it wouldn’t get better. He said she’d probably need cataract surgery within the year, and even then, her vision would never be what it was.

I drove Mother home. I didn’t say much. She fell asleep in the passenger seat.

When we got back to the house, Gloria’s car was in the driveway. She was in the kitchen making dinner. She smiled when we came in and asked how the appointment went.

I put the pill bottle on the counter in front of her.

“Dr. Pruitt says this is damaging her eyes,” I said.

Gloria looked at the bottle. She didn’t pick it up. She just looked at it.

“It’s for her memory,” she said.

“She doesn’t have memory problems,” I said. “And I never signed a consent form for it.”

Gloria wiped her hands on a dish towel. She still didn’t look at me.

“You signed it last November,” she said. “You just don’t remember.”

“I didn’t sign it, Gloria.”

She turned around then, and her face had that tight, patient expression she used when she thought I was being difficult.

“Dr. Feldman said it would help,” she said. “He said if we started her on it early, it could slow things down.”

“What things?” I asked. “She doesn’t have dementia.”

“Not yet,” Gloria said. “But it runs in Dad’s family. You know that.”

I felt something cold slide down my spine. Dad’s mother had died of Alzheimer’s in a nursing home in 1996. But Dad himself had been sharp as a tack until the heart attack took him. Mother’s mind was fine. She forgot small things sometimes, like where she’d put her reading glasses, but she could tell you the name of every neighbor on the street and the exact date of every grandchild’s birthday.

“How much does it cost?” I asked.

Gloria looked away.

“How much, Gloria?”

“Two hundred and eighty dollars a month,” she said. “But the doctor said it was worth it.”

I did the math in my head. Eleven months. That was $3,080. I thought about the budget spreadsheet I kept on my laptop, the one where I tracked every dollar of Mother’s $1,920 a month. I thought about how tight things had been, how many times Gloria had said we needed to cut back on daycare or skip the aide for a week because money was short.

“Where’s the money coming from?” I asked.

Gloria didn’t answer.

I went to the dining room and got my laptop. I opened the bank account Mother had set up with both our names on it, the one we used to pay her bills. I scrolled back through eleven months of statements.

There were no charges to any pharmacy for $280. There were no checks written to Dr. Feldman.

But there were eleven withdrawals, one a month, for $500 each. All of them made at the ATM on Gloria’s side of town. All of them on the day before Mother’s Social Security deposit hit.

I walked back into the kitchen. Gloria was still standing by the stove. She wasn’t cooking anymore. She was just standing there.

“You’ve been taking five hundred a month out of her account,” I said.

“I needed it,” Gloria said.

“For what?”

She didn’t answer.

“For what, Gloria?”

“Kevin lost his job,” she said. Her voice was very quiet. “In January. He hasn’t found anything yet. We were going to lose the house.”

Kevin was Gloria’s husband. I hadn’t known he’d been laid off. Gloria had never said anything.

“So you stole from Mother,” I said.

“I didn’t steal,” Gloria said. “I borrowed. I was going to pay it back.”

“You’ve taken fifty-five hundred dollars,” I said. “In eleven months.”

Gloria’s face crumpled. She sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands.

“I didn’t know the pills would hurt her,” she said. “I swear I didn’t know. The doctor said they were safe. He said they’d help.”

“What doctor?” I asked. “Who is Dr. Feldman?”

Gloria looked up at me. Her eyes were red.

“He’s not a real doctor,” she said. “He’s Kevin’s cousin. He works at a clinic in Salina. He said he could write the prescription if I paid cash.”

I stood there for a long time. I looked at Gloria, and I looked at Mother, who was sitting in her chair by the window, staring at the television she could barely see. I thought about the appointment cards, and the forged signature, and the eleven months of pills that had stolen my mother’s eyesight so Gloria could keep her house.

I thought about the gray room. I thought about how many times Mother had tried to tell me something was wrong, and how many times I’d brushed her off because I trusted Gloria to handle it.

Dr. Pruitt filed a report with the state. I don’t know if anything came of it. Gloria moved out two weeks later. Kevin found a job in Topeka, or maybe he didn’t and that was just the excuse. I didn’t ask.

Mother lives with me now, just me. I hired a real aide, someone who comes every day. I handle all the pills myself. I check every label. I ask questions.

Her vision didn’t stabilize. It got worse. She had the cataract surgery in March, but it didn’t help as much as Dr. Pruitt hoped. She can see shapes now, and light, but not much else. She knows my voice. She knows when I’m in the room.

Last week she asked me if Gloria ever calls. I told her no. She nodded, like she’d expected that, and then she said the room still looked gray but it was okay because I was there.

I don’t have an answer for her. I never did.