I told my wife in February, at two in the morning, and it took me four tries to get the sentence out: if I split it, the last nineteen years become nothing. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. Every Sunday I drove out there while my brothers were free — every holiday I sat across from a man who never once said he was sorry — and the money is the only object in the world that says those Sundays happened. Divide it six ways and it goes back to being what my sister called it at the funeral, which is that I was the one who couldn’t stand up to him. I know how that sounds. I’ve heard myself say it out loud exactly once and it sounded worse than it does in my head.
The line he wrote is the real problem, not the shares. He named them. He said which one of them he considered a coward and why, and my sister has asked me twice what the letter says, and I’ve told her twice that it doesn’t matter, which is a lie of the exact kind he specialized in. I’m sitting on a document written by a cruel man for the express purpose of hurting five people from beyond the grave, and every month I don’t show it or destroy it, I’m the one holding the knife he set down.
So what I’ve actually decided, nineteen months in, is nothing, which is itself a decision and I know it. My brother in Ohio stopped answering in the spring. My youngest sister still texts me on my birthday. What my wife said in February — after she let me finish, after she’d waited a long time — is that I’m asking a bank account to do a job my father refused to do, and that it can’t, and that no amount of money is going to turn into an apology no matter how long I hold it. She was right. I’ve written the checks four times. They’re in a drawer with the letter, unsigned, and every few weeks I take them out and look at them and put them back.
