From my aunt Delphine, my father’s sister, seventy-six, who I had not heard from in three years.
“Josiah.
Honey.
Vonetta called me crying.”
“I’m sure.”
“She says you’ve hired a lawyer against her.
She says you’ve been to see Clayton and got him agitated.”
“Aunt Del.
She told me he was d*ad.”
Silence on that line went nine seconds.
“She told me he was in a facility,” my aunt said slowly.
“She never said d*ad.
She said — she said you weren’t to be told because you were inside and it would only torment you.”
“I got out three weeks ago, Delphine.
She stood in the doorway and told me he was in the ground.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Did you ever go see him?”
And my aunt — who is seventy-six and who I love — said the sentence that this family runs on.
“She said he didn’t do well with visitors.”
“Did you check?”
“…No.”
“Delphine.
He’s in room 108 at Halloway.
Visiting hours are ten to seven.
There’s a sign-in book at the front desk.
Fourteen months.”
She was crying.
“Can’t you just let the house go, Josiah?
You’ve been through so much.
Take your daddy and let her keep the house and walk away clean.”
“Aunt Del, if I walk away, she’s still his agent,” I said.
“It was never about the house.
Whoever holds that paper decides who sees him.”
PART 4
I was arrested eleven days before the hearing.
I want to state plainly that it was my own fault.
I drove to Ridgemont at nine at night because Ruth’s investigator told me Royce had been seen loading boxes into a truck, and I stood in the street — in the street, not the driveway — and I shouted my father’s name at that house, and Vonetta called the police.
With a felony record, on the street, at night, shouting.
I was held eleven days.
It was the single stupidest thing I have ever done and it is also the reason the image of that day exists at all, because I appeared at my father’s guardianship hearing in county custody clothes with a sheriff’s deputy at either shoulder.
Ruth Adler was furious with me.
She was also, she told me later, not entirely sorry, because “Josiah, a judge who has read a file about a woman hiding a man from his son does not mind seeing the son in an orange shirt.
It makes her wonder who put him in it.”
The hearing was on a Tuesday.
The courtroom was full, because Vonetta had brought people — her church circle, two of her friends, her sister — the way a person does when they believe they are attending a formal confirmation of their own good character.
I was allowed one personal item.
I brought a framed photograph of my father that Ruth had retrieved from storage unit 108, from a box my mother had packed in 2011.
I sat at the table and held it against my chest with both arms, because my hands were cuffed in front and there was nowhere else to put it.
Ruth put on the case in about fifty minutes.
The revoked power of attorney, filed with her office four years ago and notarized six weeks before my trial.
The deed, recorded eleven months ago, transferring the house to herself under an authority that did not permit self-gifting.
The Halloway admission record — correct, legal, and never disclosed to the patient’s only child.
And then, because a judge is allowed to hear the whole thing once, the recording.
Eleven minutes.
The courtroom listened to my stepbrother move money.
And at minute seven, in a room of forty people, everybody heard a woman’s voice say:
“Royce, the boy’s going to see it.
Give it to Clayton to sign and tell him it’s the insurance.”
Vonetta stood up before her own attorney could get a hand on her.
