I think he knew, somewhere, that the calculation was incomplete. I don’t think he walked into it purely in bad faith. I think he had a story he’d been telling himself, a story where his role was “the one who gave space” and my role was “the one who got to stay close,” and in that story the arrangement was roughly fair, maybe even generous to me.
The thing about the $48,000 he’d received from Mom is that I don’t think he ever fully connected it to the question of who had it better. He needed money in a hard year; she helped; that was something between him and her. The fact that she helped him with money because she couldn’t help him with presence, and that she relied on me for presence because she’d spent money helping him — he hadn’t drawn that line.
Or maybe he had and had been careful not to look directly at it.
I’m not the person who can know that. What I know is that when I put the estate summary on the table in Patricia’s conference room and said his name next to the number forty-eight thousand dollars, something shifted in his face that was not surprise. It was something more like recognition. Like seeing something he had not let himself see clearly before.
He said: “Those were loans.” And he knew that documentation didn’t support that, and he said it anyway because it was the only thing he had left to say.