I was the one who called on Sundays. I was the one he texted random photos to — a bird in the yard, a book he was reading, once an inexplicably zoomed-in picture of a fern that he never explained. I was the one he called at eleven at night when he couldn’t sleep and wanted to talk about nothing in particular. These are not equivalent contributions and I knew it, and I think Vanessa knew I knew it, and neither of us had ever actually talked about what we each thought it meant.
We had a complicated relationship, the three of us. Martin Ellis was not a simple father to have. He had his favorites, his moods, his inexplicable intensities about minor things and his inexplicable lack of intensity about things that mattered. Both of us, at different times and in different ways, had been hurt by him and loved him anyway, which is the condition of being someone’s child.
He had approximately $360,000 in total assets — the house, the investment account, the smaller savings. Not a fortune, but more than I’d expected, more than he’d ever let on. He lived modestly. He wore the same three pairs of pants for fifteen years. He drove a car with a cracked dashboard he never fixed.
We didn’t know the exact number yet when Vanessa called the family together that Tuesday evening. We knew there was a will. We knew he had a lawyer — I’d heard him mention her name, Mara Chen, in the context of “getting my affairs in order,” which he said with a kind of satisfaction that I now understand was a person completing a project rather than preparing for death.