The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
“She never told me,” Keith said.
“She wouldn’t. Your sister has called me four times in six years. Every one was for him.” He picked at a splinter. “And I’ll tell you another thing. My mother went into the home in Waupaca in ‘ninety-eight. We sold the Pruitt eighty to pay for it. That’s how it works for every farmer in this county. The farm goes to the nursing home, and what’s left doesn’t cover the funeral.” He looked at Keith for the first time. “Your dad’s farm is your dad’s farm today because of Sandy. If she’d put him in a home, he’d have been broke by the fourth year. There’d be nothing for you to divide.”
Keith looked down at the legal pad on his knee, with the sixty-forty written at the top and underlined twice, and felt his face go hot.
Brooke came at noon.
My niece is twenty-six and works as a nurse on a cardiac floor in Milwaukee. She had driven back out from the motel without telling her parents. She found her father on the porch with the notebooks in his lap, and she sat on the step below him and held out her hand.
“Can I see?”
He gave her the second one. She turns pages the way nurses do, quick and exact. After twenty minutes she looked up with a strange face.
“Dad. This is a nursing chart. It’s a better chart than we keep at work. The turning schedule, to the minute. His skin, every pressure point.” She closed the notebook slowly. “Grandpa never had a pressure sore. Not in six years. Bedbound, that is almost impossible without a full team. Aunt Sandy was the full team. Day nurse, night nurse, aide, cook. She was every shift.”
“Brooke.”
“What would it have cost, Dad? You’re the numbers guy.”
And my brother, who could price a warehouse in his sleep, turned the legal pad to a clean sheet and took out his pen. He wasn’t doing it for them. When something confused him, for thirty-four years, he had reached for a ruler.
Memory care, round the clock. $8,000/mo. Conservative.
79 months.
He multiplied. The pen stopped.
Then he wrote underneath it the figure for the whole of what our father had left, the farm and the house and the savings and the machinery together, after sixty years of work.
It was a hundred and eighty thousand dollars less.
He sat on that step and looked at the two numbers for a long, long time. Then he said something so quiet that Brooke had to ask him to repeat it.
“I told her she sat in a recliner.”
His daughter put a hand on his knee.
“I told eleven people at Dad’s own table,” he said, “that she sat in a recliner.”
I pulled into the yard at half past twelve with a pan of church bars on the passenger seat.
I saw them from the driveway, my brother and my niece on the porch steps, the same steps where I had found Pop six years and seven months before. Keith had the three notebooks stacked in his lap. When he saw my car he stood too quickly and the top one slid onto the boards, and Brooke caught it.
I got out and walked across the gravel. He came down to meet me at the bottom step. My brother does not cry easily. His eyes were swollen now, and he stood there with his reading glasses still pushed up in his hair and the legal pad folded in his hand, and he did not wipe his face.