She said his name once, and then she said: Not today. Not at Dad’s. And not ever again. Twenty-four years of it’s just bad timing, and it ended in eleven words at a coat rack with her father’s flowers still in the next room. He started to explain — the transmission, the second job falling through, the thing with the apartment — and she let him get about half of it out and then said, I know. You’ve had a hard time since 2001 and you’ve had it at every funeral we’ve buried. I have never heard her use that voice on anybody in my life, let alone her own brother.
Then she did the part I wasn’t ready for. She said she’d counted it up in January when their father went into hospice, sitting in a hospital parking garage with her phone out, and the number is somewhere over sixty thousand dollars across nine funerals and twenty-four years, and about forty of it came from us. She said she’d known the whole time. Not suspected — known, and made a decision every single time to let it happen, because the alternative was six weeks of phone calls from three aunts about how her husband thinks he’s better than everyone.
He left before the cemetery. Two of her cousins came over afterward, separately, and both of them said some version of the same thing, which is that he’d done it to them too and they’d assumed they were the only ones. Nobody had ever compared notes. That’s the entire architecture of a thing like this — nine funerals, four households, everybody handing over a check in a parking lot and being too embarrassed to mention it at the next family dinner.
He hasn’t called since February. There was a message in April through their aunt about how the family is being torn apart, and my wife wrote back four lines and hasn’t heard anything since. What I keep returning to is her father, who I loved, and who I suspect knew all of it — because in his last week he told me, apropos of nothing, that he’d been proud of how I’d handled myself over the years, and I thought at the time he meant work.
