The Ramp My Brother Built for Dad

“I called the VA for Dad,” I said. “Forty dollars a month, Terry. He has two shirts.”

“He doesn’t need anything up there,” Terry said. “They cover everything. Room, food, the nurses, all of it. What’s he going to spend it on? It’s going to be ours someday anyway, Stacy. I’m just holding it.”

“In a cabin?” I said. I didn’t raise my voice either. “You’re holding it in a cabin near Clear Lake?”

He hung up. He didn’t call me again for three months. Jolie didn’t either, and I didn’t know then whether she knew anything at all. I found out later she didn’t.

The VA asked Terry for a full accounting. From what I learned later, he sent in a page that said “savings and household expenses for the beneficiary” and a bank statement with most of it blacked out.

In May, the VA removed him as fiduciary. I got a copy of the letter because I had asked to be considered as his replacement.

I had to fill out forms, agree to a credit check and a background check, and sit for my own interview with Kim.

In June, they appointed me. The bank closed Terry’s fiduciary account and moved what was left into a new account in my name for Dad’s benefit. What was left was fourteen hundred and twelve dollars.

The statements came in a thick envelope the same week.

I opened them at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning with Jeff sitting next to me, and we went through them line by line.

Every month, on the third, Dad’s compensation came in. Every month, on the fifth, thirty-one hundred dollars went out by transfer to an account in Terry’s name. For two and a half years. Every single month.

Jeff got a calculator out of the junk drawer. He didn’t need it, but he did it anyway. “Thirty months,” he said. “Ninety-three thousand dollars.” He set the calculator down very gently.

I went out to the car and sat in it in the driveway with the engine off, and I cried until my face hurt.

Then I went in and washed my face and drove to Marshalltown, because it was Sunday tomorrow and Dad liked me there for chapel.

I never told Dad the number. I never told him about the cabin.

I told him the VA had made me his helper with his money now, and Terry needed a rest from it, and that was all I said.

But my father drove a truck for the Army in Vietnam and was a union man for thirty-one years.

He can’t button his own shirt anymore, but he can count, and he isn’t a fool.

It was the second Sunday in June. We were sitting in the courtyard after chapel. The chaplain had played “How Great Thou Art” on the piano, and Dad had mouthed the bass line, because his voice is too soft to sing now.

“Stacy,” he said. “That cabin on the Christmas card. The one on your refrigerator. Is that Terry’s?”

I looked at him. His eyes were clear. His hand was shaking on his knee, but his eyes were clear as a window. “Yes, Dad,” I said. “It’s Terry and Jolie’s.”

He nodded slowly. He looked at the flower bed for a long time, the marigolds the residents planted in May. Then he said, “I’d like to see it.”