Ruth Adler is seventy-four.
She has been a probate and elder law attorney for forty-one years.
She took one look at me — an ex-convict in borrowed clothes holding a cassette recorder — and said, “Oh, thank God.
Sit down.
I’ve been calling that pr*son for eleven months and they will not accept an attorney call for a man who isn’t my client.”
“Ms. Adler.
Where is my father?”
And she said it plainly, which is the only way anybody should ever say a thing like that.
“He’s at Halloway Memory Care, in the next county.
He’s been there fourteen months.
He is alive, he’s not in pain, and he does not always know what year it is.”
I put my head on that woman’s desk and cried for about four minutes, and she let me, and then she gave me a tissue and said:
“All right.
Now the hard part.
Josiah, your father is alive, which means that woman does not own that house.”
PART 3
Here is how it worked, and it is not exotic.
It is the most ordinary version of this there is.
Vonetta had a power of attorney, signed by my father in the first year of his diagnosis, when he was still himself on most days.
