I set the paper down on the counter.
I picked it up again.
I thought about calling him immediately. I thought about calling him and saying things I could not take back. I didn’t call him. I poured out the cold coffee, got the pot from the burner, poured a new cup, and sat down at the kitchen table where my mother and I had eaten maybe three thousand meals together.
It was Wednesday. Daniel’s deadline was Friday, two days away.
I put the paper facedown on the table because I didn’t want to keep looking at the number.
Then I turned it back over, because I needed to understand what I was actually looking at.
One hundred and twenty-nine thousand, six hundred dollars. For living here. For living here while I drove her to appointments, managed her medications, helped her bathe when her balance got bad, coordinated with her doctors, held her hand in the hospital, slept on a cot in her room toward the end so she wouldn’t fall getting up at night.
For twelve years of that. He was calling it free housing.
I sat at my mother’s kitchen table, in the house I had lived in and cared for and sometimes resented and sometimes loved for twelve years, and I tried to understand how my older brother had looked at the past decade of my life and arrived at a number.
Then I went looking for the folder.
THE STORY THE FAMILY HAD ACCEPTED
My mother’s name was Ruth Bennett, and she died on a Tuesday in September at seventy-eight years old. She had been declining for about three years in a way that was obvious to anyone who spent time with her, and for about six years in a way that was apparent only to people paying close attention.