“She doesn’t know it exists?”
“Josiah,” Ruth said, “in forty-one years the single most common feature of these cases is that the person doing it is absolutely certain nobody else is keeping paper.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?”
It was not a kind question and she took it without flinching.
“Because I am not his guardian and I was not his agent — the replacement names you, and you were incarcerated, so it couldn’t operate.
I filed a concern with Adult Protective Services in March.
They visited.
He was clean, fed, appropriately placed, and his wife had lawful authority, so they closed it.
That is the correct outcome under the law and it is the wrong outcome, and I have been sitting on this for eleven months waiting for you to walk up those stairs.”
Ruth made me do one thing before I went, and I resented it for about four days and have thanked her for it ever since.
She made me write out what I was going to say.
“Josiah, you have four years of things stored up.
You’re going to walk in there with all of it and he has maybe twenty good minutes in him, and you will spend them on you.”
“He’s my father.”
“He is.
