The Sunday Drive That Settled Daddy’s Rent

The form was on top of the stack, a thin white sheet with Bobby Whitt’s name typed in the corner and my father’s name under it. Rents, it said. Twenty-six thousand dollars, for the year.

I read it sitting in my car in the gravel lot behind the tax preparer’s office, with the engine off and the folder open on the steering wheel. Sherry had asked me to drop it off because Roger had a follow-up with his heart doctor that morning.

Underneath the form was Daddy’s bank statement for December. I am a retired postmaster. I spent thirty-one years making numbers match, and I knew in about four seconds that these did not.

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. There was nothing else in that account, not in December and not in any month before it.

No rent. Not thirteen thousand in March, not thirteen thousand in November. Not one dollar from the 200 acres my father had worked since he was a boy.

I sat there an hour.

For three years I had been paying $2,100 a month toward Daddy’s bill at the nursing home. The bill was $7,400. His Social Security and the old care policy covered $5,300. The rest came out of my retirement, every month, on the first.

I had done it because my sister told me Daddy’s money was gone. She said it the week he went in, standing in the hallway outside his room with her purse held in front of her like a shield.

“The savings went on the hospital and the rehab,” she said. “And Bobby’s quit the crop ground, Teresa. He’s just running cattle out there now for keeping the fences up. There’s nothing coming in but his checks.”

I believed her. Why would I not believe her? She was my big sister. She had Daddy’s power of attorney because she lived eleven miles from him and I lived forty, and because she had always been the one who handled the paperwork.

I went home that night and sat down with my husband, Doug, at our kitchen table. Doug drove a road grader for the county highway department for twenty-eight years. He does not waste words, and he did not waste any that night.

“We’ll pay it,” he said. “Your daddy fed half this county one way or another. We’re not going to let him go on Medicaid while he’s still got land in his name.” He was right that Daddy could not have qualified anyway, not with 200 acres.

So we paid it. We put off the new roof. We stopped talking about the trip to see the Smoky Mountains that we had been talking about for twenty years. I never once complained to Sherry, and I never once asked her to show me a statement.

That was my mistake, and I own it. I trusted a piece of paper I had never seen because the person holding it was my sister.

Now I had seen the paper. It was on my steering wheel, and it said Bobby Whitt had paid my father $26,000 in rent last year, and Bobby Whitt was not a man who sent a form to the government unless the money had changed hands.

I did not call Sherry. I want to say that plainly, because I have thought about it a hundred times since. I had my phone in my hand. Her name was right there.