Tamar

Bookkeeper WYLIE GORNTO, 55, lives with his mother EUNICE GORNTO, 90, as her caregiver. She has mild dementia and constantly throws away money on lottery and sweepstakes scams that prey through the mail on the elderly, making them think they’ve won millions of dollars, requiring only “processing fees” to collect. Unable to stop her from sending money to these predators, Wylie bitterly tells a friend he would love to hunt down and kill them. He embezzles a few thousand dollars from his employer to help pay a lady to stay with his mom each day while he works. One night Eunice falls in the shower and hits her head. She drowns, as a washcloth covers the drain, before Wylie finds her. She’s cremated, her ashes placed in a crypt. A few weeks later in a restaurant, Wylie is stunned by the sight of a woman who casually gets up from a table and leaves. She looks amazingly like his mother Eunice at age 48. The next day the woman comes to Wylie’s house. He almost thinks she’s a ghost, till she says that she is his half-sister TAMAR, a waitress from California, who had hoped to meet her biological mother. Wylie remembers that his mother Eunice left him and his late father for a couple of years, due to his father's abuse, when Wylie was a little boy. He now learns that she went to California, where she met a man and had a baby by him, but the man had no interest in a child. She had the infant adopted by a family named Tinsley before leaving the man and returning home to take care of Wylie. Wylie can’t get over how much Tamar looks like Eunice. He has more than one scare, as when he sees Tamar twiddle her thumbs like Eunice used to do. But despite misgivings he has a compulsion to ask her to stay, to not go back to California, as they both are alone and are family. They agree that if he’ll write a will leaving Tamar what he inherited from Eunice (the house and $50,000 from a CD), giving Tamar some security if Wylie should die first, she will go to California to settle her affairs and return. She leaves, Wylie writes the will, but she doesn’t come back. Meanwhile Wylie is tried and convicted for embezzlement. The day before he’s scheduled to begin a prison sentence, he flies to Phoenix, Arizona, buys a second-hand pistol, and hunts down two of the fraudsters, a CON MAN and his WIFE, who preyed on his mother. Holding them at gunpoint, he collects evidence of their scam in a bag, has them write a confession, then has them call 911 about being hostages. Outside in his rental car he waits for the cops, the confession and evidence beside him. The Con Man appears with a pistol at the passenger-side window and demands the bag. They shoot each other, Wylie mortally wounded. His ATTORNEY back home locates Wylie’s heir TAMAR TINSLEY, 48, a strapped waitress who is surprised by the inheritance and comes from California to receive it. She is not the Eunice-lookalike who visited Wylie. Tamar says she wrote to her biological mother, who wrote back, but she and her half-brother never met. So who was Wylie’s “Tamar”? When the attorney leaves her alone for a moment at Eunice and Wylie’s crypt, Tamar quietly asks her mother, “Was Tamar really you?” And by now it seems clear that, yes, the “Tamar” who visited Wylie was the ghost of Eunice. Though she couldn’t help Wylie in his legal plight—was she even aware of it?—she had come to help her baby girl, through Wylie, as a way to make amends, as much as possible, for giving her up at birth.