“I need you to do something,” he said, “and I need you to do it before the end of the month. Before anyone else finds out.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“I need you to take your name off the joint accounts,” he said. “Open two new accounts in your name only. Transfer everything into them.”
For a moment, I thought grief had misunderstood him for me.
“Walter, what are you talking about?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, “Denton’s wife has been calling the company attorney. Asking questions she has no business asking.”
Her name was Suki.
Denton had married her six years earlier in a ceremony we paid for, at a venue she chose, with a guest list she controlled. I had smiled through all of it because she was my son’s wife, and I wanted to believe she loved him.
I had tried.
For six years, I had tried.
“What kind of questions?” I asked.
Walter looked at me with the kind of tired that does not come from one bad night.
“She already knows I’m sick,” he said. “Someone told her. And she is trying to understand what happens to the company when I’m gone.”
I sat with that for a long time.
“She is not entitled to anything,” I said finally.
“No,” Walter said. “But she will try anyway. And Denton will let her.”
That was the hardest part.
Not what Suki might do. We both knew who Suki was by then, even if we rarely said it plainly.
The hard part was Walter saying out loud what we had both been unwilling to admit for years.
Our son had become a man who let his wife lead him into places he never would have gone on his own.
I opened the accounts the following Tuesday.
By Thursday, I had transferred everything Walter told me to move. He sat at the kitchen table with his reading glasses on, checking each confirmation number against a handwritten list.
When it was done, he folded the paper, put it inside an envelope, and wrote my name across the front.
“Do not open this until you need to,” he said.
I wanted to argue.