…Dr. Richard Hale. He’s listed as the attending physician.”
I had never heard the name. I called my mother at once. She answered on the first ring, perfectly alive and slightly annoyed that I’d interrupted her favorite show.
When I said the name Richard Hale, she stopped talking. For a long time.
Then she said, “I’ll be there in an hour. Don’t call anyone else.”
She sat in my kitchen and told me a story I had never heard. The man who raised me, my father, Joe, wasn’t my biological father. My biological father was Richard Hale, a surgeon she’d been married to briefly in her twenties. He was charming, wealthy and violent.
She left him when I was two and married Joe a year later. Richard spent years trying to get custody. On June 17, 1994, he showed up at our house at midnight, drunk, and threatened to take me. My parents packed the car and drove us to Joe’s brother’s cabin in Maine. They stayed for three weeks while lawyers got an emergency protective order.
Richard eventually signed away his parental rights. As part of the settlement, he put a hundred thousand dollars in trust for me. My mother insisted on one condition: that I would never be contacted by him or receive the money while she was alive. She didn’t want him to use it as a way back into my life.
“He must be dying,” she said quietly. “He wanted you to have it, and he couldn’t wait.”
She was right. Richard was eighty-one and in hospice care. He had used his old medical license number to submit a fraudulent death certificate for my mother so the bank would release the trust. He put the check inside the gardening book because his nurse told him I volunteered at that library every week. The note was his way of asking me to hear my mother’s side first.
The bank reported the false certificate to the police. Because Richard was terminally ill, prosecutors declined to charge him. I was allowed to decide what to do with the money.
I didn’t visit him. My mother said she would support me either way. I chose not to.
I cashed the check. I gave half to a shelter for women escaping abusive marriages. With the other half, I took my mother and my father, Joe, back to that cabin in Maine. We spent three weeks there, just like in 1994. This time, nobody was running from anything.
