The house on Alder Street is on the market. Neither of us could live in it and none of us can be in it.
I have been in therapy since August, which I have never done before, and about half of it is about my mother and the other half is about a car park on Hanley Street in August of 2018.
Because here is the thing I keep landing on.
My father sat in a car for forty minutes in a town he had lived in since 1971 and could not find his own house.
And the person who noticed, and made the appointment, and drove him, and sat in the car park, was a woman who worked at his front desk.
Not me. I called him on Sundays.
Not Lucan.
She had been the office manager at Ellery Millwork since 2010. Nine years. She was at my mother’s funeral in April of 2018 and I did not know who she was and I did not ask, and four hundred people were there and she stood at the back.
I called her a gold digger at my brother’s kitchen table in December of 2018, out loud, to his wife, while my nephew was in the room.
I did the arithmetic. Thirty-six years. I said the number like it was a verdict.
And it took a dead man, a sealed envelope, and a seventy-one-year-old funeral director reading two and a half pages in a room full of people, to make me ask a single question I could have asked in 2019 for free.
The headline everybody in Winsley used afterward — and people did use it, it went around — was that at his funeral, she finally got what she deserved.
They’re right. That is exactly what happened.
It just took him being dead for six and a half years of silence to be worth anything, and it took two hundred witnesses, because he knew — he knew, in January of 2019, with a diagnosis eleven weeks old and his handwriting still steady — that his own children would not have believed her if she’d said it herself.
May you like
He was right about that as well.
