PART 2
And somewhere in there I made a quiet decision, at about sixty-two, sitting on my own in a rented flat.
That I would never be another thing for that boy to carry.
He had carried enough.
He carried his mother’s last eleven months at twenty-six years old, because I could not do all of it and because somebody had to be in that room on the four afternoons a week I was at work.
Nobody ever said thank you to that boy for those eleven months.
Not his aunts. Not the four people who spoke at the funeral.
Not me. Not once, in ten years, in about four hundred telephone calls.
That decision is the whole of this story.
Everything that follows is only the detail of it — the flat, the pantry, the envelopes, the eight thousand a month. All of it comes out of one sentence a man said to himself in a rented room at sixty-two with nobody there to argue.
It put me in a cold apartment on the north side for three years. Peeling paint in the hall by the meter. A radiator that works when it feels like it and has been looked at four times.
And a space heater that I run beside the kitchen table from about the first week of November until March, which costs more than the radiator would and which I know perfectly well.
Twice a week I walk six blocks to a church pantry.
Tuesdays and Fridays. It takes about eleven minutes each way and I go early, before it fills up.
Soup. Bread. Powdered milk. Tinned fruit, which I do not much like and take anyway. Enough to see me through to the next one.
It is a good pantry.
The people who run it are kind and completely unsentimental about it, which is the correct way to run one and which about four other places I have been to have not managed.
Nobody there has ever asked me what I did for a living. I have never told them.
There are about twenty of us most mornings.
I know four of them by name. One of them taught secondary school mathematics for thirty-one years and we have had four conversations about percentages that I have enjoyed more than most dinners.
Nobody there asks anybody anything. That is the arrangement and it is a good one.
Whenever Emmett rang — and he rang every Sunday, without fail, for three years, which I want on the record before anybody starts on him —
he told me about the family trust.
He said: Thea manages it. It’s all set up.
And then: you shouldn’t have to think about any of it, Dad.
Which is a lovely thing for a son to say to his father, and which is also, as I now understand, an instruction that I followed to the letter for three years.
And I said thank you.
And I meant it, every time, which is the part that is hard to explain.
And then I changed the subject — to the business, to the weather, to anything at all — the way I have been changing subjects in that family since about 1998.
So I never asked. Not once in three years.
Not a question about the amount. Not about which institution. Not about when it had started or who the signatories were.
Four questions. Any one of them would have ended it inside about eleven seconds.
A man who spent forty years asking exactly that question of strangers for a living.
I assumed it was sitting somewhere, accruing quietly, for when I needed a nurse or a roof.
