Part Ten: The Financial Architecture
My husband and I had been supporting my parents’ household for eleven years.
This was not a secret but was also not something that was discussed openly, which was itself a kind of statement about how the support was understood. It had begun when my father’s business had failed and they were going to lose the house. We had helped. That was the word we used: helped. We covered their mortgage payments. When the mortgage was restructured, we covered the restructured amount. We paid various bills when they came due and my parents were short. We had been paying Ryan’s private school tuition for four years because Dana had asked and we had said yes.
I had said yes to all of these things because they were my family and that was what you did.
The day after Thanksgiving, I called our bank.
The day after that, I called a lawyer — a family attorney recommended by a colleague, a woman named Patricia Ferraro who was precise and thorough and who did not, in our initial meeting, express any opinion about what I should do, only mapped for me clearly what my options were.
The mortgage payments stopped. The bills stopped. The tuition stopped. The various transfers that had been running quietly from our account to theirs, the ones I had set up with such reliable regularity that I had stopped thinking of them as decisions, stopped being transfers.
I also asked Ms. Ferraro about our options regarding the property situation, which was more complicated because of how the assistance had been structured over the years. The details of this are not mine to go into in full. What I can say is that the cessation of the financial support had, within a matter of weeks, consequences that were structural and significant.
My mother called me from the hospital three days after Leo was admitted. She came to the hospital, I should say — she came in person, which I had not expected. She sat in the chair across from me in the family waiting room and she said she was sorry.
I looked at her.
I thought about the phone taken from my hand. I thought about don’t make a scene. I thought about Leo on the floor and the color of his face and the sound of him trying to breathe.
“I know you’re sorry,” I said. “I believe you. But sorry doesn’t change what you chose. When you had to choose between Leo and keeping things normal, you chose keeping things normal. I needed to know that, and now I do.”
She said more things. I listened to them. I did not respond to most of them.
She left.
