PART 3 — LETTER
The lawyer handed me the envelope in front of the whole family. On the front, in Earls shaky handwriting, it said, For my sunshine. Read it out loud.
So I did. My hands shook, but I read every word. Earl wrote that he knew exactly how his wife and son treated me, that he had seen it for years and been too tired and too sick to fight it. He wrote that in two years of dialysis, three times a week, the only hand that ever drove him was mine.
Then he wrote the part that made the room go pale. He had quietly set aside an account of his own, separate from the will, and named me the sole beneficiary, in thanks for the care no one else in that family had given him.
They sat me in the back of the church and called me a stranger, and Earl reached up from his own grave to call me his family in front of all of them.
Martha could not look at me. Todd stared at the table. The lawyer slid a second document across to me, and it was just as Earl had written.
I did not read that letter to shame anyone. Earl asked me to read it out loud, and I honored a dying mans wish, the same way I had honored his living ones for two years on the road to dialysis.
Todd whispered that he was sorry as we left. I told him I forgave him, and I meant it, but that I would not be going back to a family that only called me one of them when a letter forced them to.
I used what Earl left me to endow two chairs in the dialysis centers waiting room, with a little plaque that reads, For Earl Whitaker, who called me sunshine. He was the only one who ever did. It turned out he was the only one who mattered.