The form was sitting right on top of the stack.
It was a thin white sheet with Bobby Whitt’s name typed in the upper corner and my father’s name typed underneath it. Halfway down, in a little box, was one word and one number.
Rents. $26,000.
I read it sitting in my car in the gravel lot behind the tax preparer’s office, with the engine off and the manila folder propped open against the steering wheel. My sister Sherry had asked me to drop Daddy’s tax papers off for her that morning because her husband, Roger, had a follow-up with his heart doctor.
Underneath that form was Daddy’s bank statement from Farmers National Bank. December.
I’m a retired postmaster. I spent thirty-one years making numbers match. I knew in about four seconds that these didn’t.
His Social Security went in on the third. His long-term care policy paid on the tenth. The nursing home drew its money out on the fifteenth. That was it. There was nothing else in that account.
Not in December. Not in any month before it.
No rent. Not $13,000 in March. Not $13,000 in November. Not one single dollar from the 200 acres my father had worked since he was a boy.
I flipped back to the form. Then back to the statement. Then back to the form again, like the numbers might rearrange themselves if I gave them enough chances.
They didn’t.
I sat there for an hour. Cars came and went from the lot. A man in a feed cap went in with a shoebox full of receipts and came out without it. I didn’t move.
Because for three years, I had been paying $2,100 a month toward my daddy’s bill at the nursing home.
The bill was $7,400 a month. His Social Security and his old long-term care policy covered $5,300 of it. The rest came out of my retirement. Every month. On the first.
Thirty-six months. I didn’t have to get out a calculator for that one. I knew the number the way you know your own phone number.
$75,600.
I’d done it because my sister told me Daddy’s money was gone.
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