Inside the envelope was a handwritten letter and a bank statement.
The letter started with, “Carol, if you’re reading this, it means the kids did exactly what I was afraid they’d do.”
I had to sit down on the apartment floor.
My ex-husband wrote that his cancer got worse faster than he told anybody. Said he tried talking to our son about some financial problems before he died, but after that our son suddenly became obsessed with “handling everything.”
Then I looked at the bank statement.
Our son had been taking money from him for almost a year.
Not little amounts either. Three thousand here. Five thousand there. “Temporary loans” my ex kept writing in the notes section. By the end it added up to almost eighty thousand dollars.
The storage-unit key explained the rest.
I drove there the same afternoon.
Inside were photo albums, military medals, my baby daughter’s crib, fishing poles, old Christmas decorations, and three metal lockboxes. Things our son told me had already been donated or thrown away after the funeral.
The flip phone had dozens of saved voicemails too.
One of them was my ex-husband crying, actually crying, saying, “I think he’s waiting for me to die before he stops asking for money.”
I listened to that message sitting in my car until the battery died.
When I finally confronted my son, he didn’t deny any of it. Said his dad “wanted to help” and accused me of trying to make him feel guilty after he’d “carried all the stress” alone.
Carried the stress.
By emptying a dying man’s account.
I stopped speaking right there. Truly stopped.
That was eight months ago.
He still texts on holidays sometimes.
I never answer.