The lawyer took out Daddy’s green notebook, cleared his throat, and said, “Before we open the will, your father asked me to read this part out loud, in this room, with everyone present.”
Charlene shifted in her chair up front. I stayed by the door where I had been standing, because eight years of waiting rooms teaches you to stand near exits.
The notebook started out as a mileage log. That is all it ever was supposed to be, because Daddy filed his own taxes until he was eighty-one and he did not trust anybody’s memory, including his. Every page the same. Date. Destination. Odometer out, odometer back. Who drove.
The lawyer read a few. March the fourteenth, VA Springfield, infusion, forty-one miles, and then in the margin, in pencil, meatloaf, he beat me to the check again. June the second, forty-one miles, they moved us to the third floor and it took four hours. November, forty-one miles, snow, we sang.
Eight years of forty-one miles. He wrote down who drove every single time. Not once did he editorialize about who did not.
Then the lawyer turned to the back pages, the ones written in a shaky hand three weeks before the end, dated on a Tuesday and signed underneath by Denise Vollmer, RN, hospice, who was asked to sit down and witness and did not know why until she got there.
It was a codicil. Handwritten, in his own hand, witnessed, valid in this state and every state, and it did not take one dollar away from my sister. He split everything down the middle, the way he always said he would, the house and the accounts and the little bit from the Legion insurance, half and half, and he said so in a sentence so plain it sounded like him standing in the kitchen.
Then he said the other thing.
Charlene, I loved you every day of the twice a year, and I never once counted it against you. But I know what gets said after a man is gone, so I am putting this where it cannot be argued with: your brother was there. It is written down. Forty-one miles at a time.
He left me the truck, the notebook, and four hundred dollars marked in the margin as lunch money, spend it at the Cracker Barrel, and let somebody else beat you to the check for once.
Nobody said anything for a while. Charlene did not fight it. Charlene put her face in her hands and made a sound I had not heard out of her since our mother’s funeral, and when she could talk she asked the lawyer if there was any way she could get a copy of the notebook. Not the will. The notebook.
I had it scanned at the office supply place on Glenstone and I mailed her the whole thing, all eight years, and I paid for the good paper.
We ate at the Cracker Barrel two Sundays later, her and me, and she asked what he always ordered, and I told her, and she ordered it. She reached for the check and I let her have it.
He did see everything. She was right about that. He just wrote it down instead of saying it, and he waited until we were both in the room and both quiet enough to hear it.