I pushed my plate back from that Christmas table, and I said, Dave, before you give that speech one more time, there is something you never knew about, from the last month of Dad life, and I think everyone here should hear it. And I laid on the table the letter our father wrote near the end, the one Dave had no idea existed.
Dave had spent two years telling everyone that Dad trusted only him, that our father put everything in his hands because the rest of us could not be relied on. It was a good story, and Dave told it so often that even I had started to feel small hearing it. But it was not true. And I could prove it was not true, because in the last month of his life, our father had asked me to sit with him, and he had things he wanted set down right.
Dave built his whole crown out of a story only he was allowed to tell. He never knew Dad had told a different one to me.
Near the end, Dad had gotten worried. He could see how Dave was, the way Dave liked to run things, and he did not want his death to turn into Dave running all of us. So he had me help him make it clear and make it legal. He wrote a letter, in his own hand, that said he loved all four of his children the same, and that he wanted everything split even between us, and that no one child was to lord it over the others. And he did not stop at a letter. He had a proper will drawn up and filed with his lawyer, saying the exact same thing, witnessed and signed, a will Dave never knew about because Dave assumed he already controlled everything.
I read the letter out loud at that table. Dad own words, telling all of us he trusted us all, telling Dave in plain language that he was not the chosen one, just the loudest. My sisters started to cry. Dave went white and reached for his old story, and for once there was nothing to grab, because you cannot argue with your father own signature.
The will did the rest. A filed, witnessed will undoes a lot of speeches at a lot of Christmas tables. Everything Dave had been handing out like favors got divided the way Dad actually wanted, four ways, even, the way it should have been from the start.
Dave is quieter at the holidays now. He does not give the speech about being the responsible one anymore. And my sisters and I got back something better than a fair share of the furniture. We got our father back, the real one, who loved us all the same and said so, right when it counted. Dave spent two years making Dad a prop in his own story. It turned out Dad had written the ending himself, and left it with me.