The Cash Box in Dad’s Closet

The week after we buried my father I went through his hall closet looking for the life insurance policy and found a steel cash box holding forty-one winters of paid propane and electric bills, and not one account on them was ours.

I almost did not find it.

The closet is the narrow one by the bathroom, with the vacuum cleaner and a roll of Christmas wrapping paper he bought in 1999 and never finished. The policy was supposed to be in the cracker box on the top shelf with the deed and my mother’s death certificate. It was not there.

I stood on the step stool in his too-big wool socks and moved the wrapping paper aside. Behind it sat a gray steel cash box with a tray and a little brass lock that had never once been locked.

It was heavy enough that I thought it held coins.

It held paper. Under the tray, standing on edge like files in a drawer, were forty-one bundles of receipts, each one held with a rubber band gone brittle and topped with an index card.

The cards had years on them, written in his square, careful hand. The first said 1985. The last said last winter.

I took out the first bundle and sat down on the closet floor, because my knees would not do the stool again.

The top slip was a yellow carbon copy from the Sawtell Valley Rural Electric Cooperative. Received in cash, one hundred and sixty-two dollars and eleven cents. Applied to the account of someone named Alcorn.

The next was a delivery ticket from Bannock Ridge Propane, two hundred gallons, billed to a Kemp, marked paid in full.

I went through the whole first bundle. Thirty-one slips, nineteen different names, and not one of them was Renner.

My father, Arlo Renner, was eighty-four when he died. He lived in a three-bedroom house on the north end of Sawtell Flat, Idaho, with the thermostat set at fifty-eight degrees and a coat he wore at the kitchen table from October to April.

I had spent most of my adult life being quietly angry at him about that thermostat.

I carried the box to the kitchen table and did arithmetic for four hours.

I am a tire man. I own a shop in Idaho Falls, seventy miles south, and I can add a column of numbers faster than most people can find their glasses. Annette came in around dusk and found me with a legal pad, a calculator and forty-one rubber bands lined up on the table like little tombstones.

“Cal,” she said. “What is all this?”

“I think my father paid for other people’s heat for forty-one years,” I said.

I read her the total off the legal pad. Two hundred and fourteen thousand, three hundred and six dollars and fifty-five cents.

She set her purse down on the counter very slowly, the way you do when a house turns out not to be the house you thought it was.

I am fifty-two years old, and I did not know the first thing about the man who raised me. What follows is what I thought I knew, and then the winter I spent finding out.