The person was my daughter, who is twenty-four and asked me directly in a car outside a hardware store. What I told her is that if I divide it, the nineteen years disappear. Not the money — the record. Every Sunday I drove out there while my brothers were free, every Christmas I sat across from a man who never once said sorry, and that estate is the only object in the world that testifies those afternoons occurred. Split it six ways and it converts back into what my sister said at the funeral: that I was the weak one who couldn’t stand up to him. I know exactly how that sounds. Said out loud in a parked car it sounded even worse than it does at two in the morning.
There’s a second thing I didn’t tell her, and it’s uglier. Part of me wants them to ask. Not to grovel — just to call, and say his name, and acknowledge that somebody went. Nineteen months and not one of the five has asked what he was like at the end, whether he was frightened, whether he said anything. They’ve asked about the will. That’s the entire content of every contact I’ve had since the funeral, and every month that passes makes it easier to tell myself they’ve earned the silence, which is precisely the arithmetic he used to do about all of us.
He also left a line in that document naming which of them he considered a coward, and I’ve told my sister twice that it doesn’t matter, which is his kind of lie exactly. My daughter said the thing that’s stayed with me: that I’m asking money to do a job my father refused to do, and it can’t, and holding it longer won’t turn it into an apology. She’s right. The checks are written — four times now, four different versions — and they’re in a drawer with the letter, unsigned. I take them out some weeks and read the amounts and put them back, and I’ve started to understand that the drawer is the point, and that I’m not waiting for a decision. I’m waiting for a phone call.
