She put him in a licensed facility two counties away, paid by his own long-term care policy, and then she simply did not tell one person on earth where he was.
Me.
Because I was the only person who would come.
And using that same power of attorney, eleven months ago, she signed a deed transferring the house on Ridgemont from Clayton Kemp to Clayton Kemp and Vonetta Kemp as joint owners with right of survivorship.
Which means: the day he d*es, it’s hers, outright, with no probate, no will, no notice to anybody.
That’s it.
That’s the crime, and it happens about four hundred times a year in this state, and almost none of them are ever called anything.
“Is that legal?” I asked Ruth.
“An agent under a power of attorney cannot make a gift to herself unless the document expressly authorizes it,” she said.
“Your father’s document did not.
I know because I have the original of the replacement he signed six weeks before your trial, which revokes hers and names you, and which she has never seen because she never asked me for anything.”
“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.
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.
He was in a chair by a window.
Seventy-one years old, thinner, shaved by somebody else, wearing a cardigan I did not recognize.
I stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then he looked up.
“Well,” my father said.
“There he is.”
“Dad.”
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’ve been up since six.”
That was a good day.
I did not know yet that you cannot order them.
We talked for forty minutes about a boat he sold in 1998.
At the end he said, “Is your mother coming?” and I said she was at the store, because the nurse had told me that morning: do not correct him about the d*ad, it is cruel and it does not stick.
When I stood up to go, he caught my wrist.
“Son.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Did you get the key?”
For a second the whole room went silent.
“I got the key.”
He nodded, satisfied, and let go, and then he asked me who I worked for now, and the good day was over.
But he asked.
Fourteen months in that room and at some level beneath the damage, my father was still waiting to hear about the key.
The pressure came the next week.
Not from Vonetta.
From my aunt Delphine, my father’s sister, seventy-six, who I had not heard from in three years.
“Josiah.
Honey.
Vonetta called me crying.”
“I’m sure.”
“She says you’ve hired a lawyer against her.
She says you’ve been to see Clayton and got him agitated.”
“Aunt Del.
She told me he was d*ad.”
Silence on that line went nine seconds.
“She told me he was in a facility,” my aunt said slowly.
“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
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