“She never said d*ad.
She said — she said you weren’t to be told because you were inside and it would only torment you.”
“I got out three weeks ago, Delphine.
She stood in the doorway and told me he was in the ground.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Did you ever go see him?”
And my aunt — who is seventy-six and who I love — said the sentence that this family runs on.
“She said he didn’t do well with visitors.”
“Did you check?”
“…No.”
“Delphine.
He’s in room 108 at Halloway.
Visiting hours are ten to seven.
There’s a sign-in book at the front desk.
Fourteen months.”
She was crying.
“Can’t you just let the house go, Josiah?
You’ve been through so much.
Take your daddy and let her keep the house and walk away clean.”
“Aunt Del, if I walk away, she’s still his agent,” I said.
“It was never about the house.
Whoever holds that paper decides who sees him.”
PART 4
I was arrested eleven days before the hearing.
I want to state plainly that it was my own fault.
I drove to Ridgemont at nine at night because Ruth’s investigator told me Royce had been seen loading boxes into a truck, and I stood in the street — in the street, not the driveway — and I shouted my father’s name at that house, and Vonetta called the police.
With a felony record, on the street, at night, shouting.
I was held eleven days.
It was the single stupidest thing I have ever done and it is also the reason the image of that day exists at all, because I appeared at my father’s guardianship hearing in county custody clothes with a sheriff’s deputy at either shoulder.
Ruth Adler was furious with me.
She was also, she told me later, not entirely sorry, because “Josiah, a judge who has read a file about a woman hiding a man from his son does not mind seeing the son in an orange shirt.
