“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.
And the man in that room is not going to be able to hold ‘I didn’t steal it, Dad.’
He’ll hold that you came.
Pick what he can hold.”
So I wrote three sentences on the back of a receipt in the parking lot at Halloway and I have them still.
“I’m out.”
“I’m not angry at you.”
“I’ll come Thursdays.”
That’s all I brought in.
Four years of being called a thief in a courtroom, and I left the whole thing in a truck in a parking lot, because a seventy-four-year-old attorney told me the truth about what a damaged brain can carry.
I have thought since that this is the actual difference between people who get these years and people who don’t.
Not the lawyers.
Not the recording.
Somebody who tells you, before you walk in, to leave your case at the door.
I saw my father on a Thursday.
Halloway Memory Care, room 108 — and I want to note that number, because my father’s storage unit was 108, and Ruth says that is a coincidence, and I have decided not to believe her.
