Three.
I signed a power of attorney because Dr. Ifeoma told me to have one, and I made a mistake in who.
I am fixing it.
Ruth Adler has the new one and it revokes the old one and it names you.
Four.
Storage 108 has everything: the ledgers, the checks, the account statements, and a recording I made on the shop telephone which I am told is legal in this state as long as one person on the line knows, and I knew.
Five.
If I am not where you’re looking for me, I am not gone.
Ask Ruth.
Don’t ask Vonetta anything.
I love you, son.
Don’t come see me angry.
Come see me on a good day.
— Dad.”
I read that letter four times standing in a cemetery, and the line that took my legs out was not any of the numbered ones.
It was the last one.
Come see me on a good day.
That is not a sentence a d*ad man writes.
Storage Unit 108 was eleven miles away, on a road full of tire shops, and the unit was paid up for six years in advance — a fact I would later learn cost my father eleven hundred dollars and which he did, Ruth Adler told me, in cash, on the day after his diagnosis, because “a man who is going to forget things pays ahead.”
