My mother wrote it about three months before she died, when she already knew the treatment wasn’t working. She told Diane that if anything happened to her, she wanted Diane to raise me. She wrote that Ray loved me in his own way, but that his way wasn’t enough for a boy like me.
Then she wrote about the trust.
Before they passed, my maternal grandparents had set up a small trust for me at Lakeland State Bank. It wasn’t life-changing money. The principal was around $140,000, invested conservatively, and it paid out a monthly distribution meant for my care. The money went to whoever was raising me, to be used for my food, clothes, and schooling.
In the letter, my mother warned Diane that Ray would use me to get at those payments. She said he had brought up the trust more than once while she was lying in the hospital. One line I’ve now read probably a hundred times: “He asked the trust officer how much it would be per month before he asked the oncologist how long I had.”
So my father hadn’t kept me because he wanted me. He kept me because I came with a check.
I put the letter down and sat at my kitchen table for a long time. I didn’t cry. I just sat there while the refrigerator hummed and the neighbor’s dog barked at something in the dark. I felt thirteen again, standing on that dirt road and watching the taillights shrink to nothing.
Then I read Megan’s letter.
It was softer, and more careful. She introduced herself, which felt strange: “Hi Thomas, I’m Megan, your half-sister.” It was as if she wasn’t sure I knew she existed.
She said she’d found my mom’s letter in Ray’s desk three weeks earlier. She had been digging for their marriage certificate for the wedding paperwork, and in the back of a file drawer she found a shoebox. My mother’s letter was inside, along with old photos of her, a copy of my custody transfer documents, and a stack of statements from Lakeland State Bank with my name on them.
