Searching for the Answer

Hot Checks

Hot Checks

In my youth one thing my mother was adamant about was making sure we had enough food regardless of the cost. The problem with this was she went to a grocery store that wasn't a chain brand out of vanity and convenience so the prices were significantly higher. She would justify paying more so she "didn't have to deal with the Mexicans." at Walmart.

This produced a problem where my mother overspent her limit to where one trip she wrote a check when she didn't have the funds and it didn't process, but because my mom shopped there so often and knew the manager they let us leave with our purchases

A store with significantly higher prices wasn't feasible in the long term so when my mother ran out of money and my father was absent also having no money, my mother turned to fraud as the solution. My older brother was eighteen and had set up a bank account and kept his checkbook out in the open in his bedroom. My mother would proceed to steal some checks from him which she used at the grocery store, signing his name. My brother didn't find out about this until he was pulled over for a minor traffic violation and the officer stated that charge was on his record. Technology wasn't all that advance in the early 2000's but the feature to view a picture of deposited checks existed and from that my brother realized our mother stole from him

Writing hot checks for food at the grocery store was not an isolated incident. When I was 16 and enrolled in a weekend motorcycle class to get my license there was a cost of several hundred to which my mother wrote a check to give them. After she gave me the check in the garage I hurtfully asked her "is this going to bounce?" She looked me dead straight and said "no." A few days after my completion of the course I get contacted by the instructor's wife saying the check didn't clear and she tried to convince me to get a job to y it myself, but the circumstances just didn't make that feasible.