The form was sitting right on top of the stack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a thin white sheet with Bobby Whitt\u2019s name typed in the upper corner and my father\u2019s name typed underneath it. Halfway down, in a little box, was one word and one number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rents. $26,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I read it sitting in my car in the gravel lot behind the tax preparer\u2019s office, with the engine off and the manila folder propped open against the steering wheel. My sister Sherry had asked me to drop Daddy\u2019s tax papers off for her that morning because her husband, Roger, had a follow-up with his heart doctor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Underneath that form was Daddy\u2019s bank statement from Farmers National Bank. December.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m a retired postmaster. I spent thirty-one years making numbers match. I knew in about four seconds that these didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His Social Security went in on the third. His long-term care policy paid on the tenth. The nursing home drew its money out on the fifteenth. That was it. There was nothing else in that account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not in December. Not in any month before it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No rent. Not $13,000 in March. Not $13,000 in November. Not one single dollar from the 200 acres my father had worked since he was a boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I flipped back to the form. Then back to the statement. Then back to the form again, like the numbers might rearrange themselves if I gave them enough chances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat there for an hour. Cars came and went from the lot. A man in a feed cap went in with a shoebox full of receipts and came out without it. I didn\u2019t move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because for three years, I had been paying $2,100 a month toward my daddy\u2019s bill at the nursing home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bill was $7,400 a month. His Social Security and his old long-term care policy covered $5,300 of it. The rest came out of my retirement. Every month. On the first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thirty-six months. I didn\u2019t have to get out a calculator for that one. I knew the number the way you know your own phone number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$75,600.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019d done it because my sister told me Daddy\u2019s money was gone.
She told me the week he went in. We were standing in the hallway outside his room, and she was holding her purse in front of her with both hands like a shield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe savings all went on the hospital and the rehab,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd Bobby\u2019s quit the crop ground, Teresa. He\u2019s just running cattle out there now for keeping the fences up. There\u2019s nothing coming in but Daddy\u2019s checks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I believed her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why would I not believe her? She was my big sister. She had Daddy\u2019s power of attorney, because she lived eleven miles from him and I lived forty, and because she\u2019d always been the one who handled the paperwork in our family. She\u2019d had a lawyer in town draw up a durable power of attorney the week after Daddy\u2019s fall. Daddy signed it in his hospital bed with the pain medicine still in him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went home that night and sat down with my husband, Doug, at our kitchen table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ezoic
Doug drove a road grader for the county highway department for twenty-eight years. He doesn\u2019t waste words, and he didn\u2019t waste any that night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll pay it,\u201d he said. \u201cYour daddy fed half this county one way or another. We\u2019re not going to let him sit in that home worrying about money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was right that Daddy couldn\u2019t have gotten on Medicaid anyway, not with 200 acres in his name. And Daddy would have died before he sold that land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we paid it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning, I called the man who handles our retirement account at the Edward Jones office in town and set up a monthly withdrawal from my IRA. $2,100 on the first of every month, deposited into our checking, then straight out again to the nursing home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a pretty big draw for your age, Teresa,\u201d he said carefully. \u201cYou sure about this?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s my daddy,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He didn\u2019t ask again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We put off the new roof on our house. The shingles over the back bedroom had been curling for two years, and we\u2019d been saving for it, $11,000, the estimate was. We set out pans when it rained hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We stopped talking about the trip to see the Smoky Mountains. Doug and I had been talking about that trip for twenty years. We used to lie in bed and plan it. Which cabin. Which overlooks. Which pancake house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We just stopped talking about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I never once complained to Sherry. I never once asked her to show me a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was my mistake, and I own it. I trusted a piece of paper I\u2019d never seen, because the person holding it was my sister.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now I\u2019d seen the paper. It was sitting on my steering wheel. And it said Bobby Whitt had paid my father $26,000 in rent last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bobby Whitt was not a man who sent a form to the government unless the money had actually changed hands.
I didn\u2019t call Sherry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to say that plainly, because I\u2019ve thought about it a hundred times since. I had my phone in my hand. Her name was right there on the screen. My thumb was right over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But a phone call would only have given her a day to build a story. And Sherry was always good with a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than that, it wasn\u2019t my money to fight over. It wasn\u2019t even my bill, not really. It was Daddy\u2019s land. Daddy\u2019s rent. Daddy\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And my father, whatever else had happened to him, could still talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went inside and handed the folder to the preparer, a nice young woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain. I didn\u2019t say a word about the form. I just smiled and said thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I drove the forty miles home with the radio off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My daddy is Clayton Akers. He\u2019s 84 years old. He raised burley tobacco and black cattle on the same rolling ground in south-central Kentucky that his own daddy raised them on. He was still cutting tobacco by hand into his seventies, sweating through his shirt in August with a tobacco knife and a spear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three years ago, he fell in the barn lot and broke his hip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They pinned it at the hospital in Bowling Green. He did the rehab and worked hard at it, harder than the therapists had ever seen an 81-year-old work. But his legs never came back the way they were. He couldn\u2019t get from the bed to the bathroom by himself anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s when he went into the nursing home in town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His mind never left him for a single day. He reads the county paper front to back every morning. He can tell you what corn brought at the elevator in 1974. The aides call him Mister Clayton and come to his room to settle their arguments about ball scores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s what made it so hard to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sherry hadn\u2019t taken money from a man who wouldn\u2019t know. She\u2019d taken it from a man who would know the very minute anybody told him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody had told him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That night, I laid the form on our kitchen table in front of Doug. He read it twice, the way he reads anything that matters, with one finger moving under every line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWell,\u201d he said finally. He set the paper down and pushed it back across the table toward me. \u201cWhat are you going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to take Daddy for a drive,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Doug looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou want me along?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought about it. Doug is a good man, and Daddy likes him. But I knew my father. I knew this was going to be a hard day for him. And I knew he wouldn\u2019t want an audience for it, not even a kind one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cI want it to be just him. Him and his land. He doesn\u2019t need a crowd. He needs to sit on his own ground and ask his own question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Sunday morning, I drove to the nursing home early, before the church crowd came through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Daddy was sitting up in his recliner by the window, already dressed, reading the paper with his glasses down on the end of his nose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou\u2019re early,\u201d he said without looking up. \u201cDid the preacher die?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNot that I heard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I kissed him on top of the head. His white hair was combed flat with water, the way he\u2019s combed it every morning of his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI want to show you something, Daddy,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd then I want to ask you something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I pulled the other chair close and sat down. I put the form in his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t explain it. Daddy filed farm taxes for sixty years. He knew what that sheet of paper was better than I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He read it once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then he took his glasses off. He wiped them slowly on the front of his shirt. He put them back on. And he read it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His mouth got thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSherry told me Bobby\u2019s rent goes on my bill here,\u201d he said slowly. \u201cShe told me the rent and my checks cover it. With a little left over for the taxes on the place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hadn\u2019t known that. I hadn\u2019t known she\u2019d told him anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had to sit very still for a minute before I could answer him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDaddy,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019ve been paying your bill. Twenty-one hundred dollars a month. Sherry told me your money was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He looked at me then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will never forget that look as long as I live. It wasn\u2019t anger. Not yet. It was the look of a man who walks out to the barn at daylight and finds the door standing wide open and every stall empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHow long?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSince you came in here. Three years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He set the form down on the arm of his recliner. He laid his hand flat on top of it. Those big old knuckles, all swollen up from arthritis, the skin spotted from eighty summers in the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He sat that way a long time, looking out the window at the parking lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you call your sister?\u201d he said finally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wasn\u2019t a question so much as him checking my thinking. That was always Daddy\u2019s way. When I was a girl and I\u2019d come to him with a problem, he\u2019d never tell me what to do. He\u2019d just ask why I did what I did, and make me hear myself say it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBecause it\u2019s not my money,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s yours. And because I figured you might like to ask somebody about it yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was quiet another moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then he said, \u201cGet my hat.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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