Personally, I don’t think my father began to steal until after my mother died. People steal for all sorts of reasons, desperation, opportunity, revenge, jealousy. I think my father stole because of resentment. He’s one of those guys who starts work at some place just fine, no problems, no temptations, but the longer he works the more he sees how many people aren’t pulling their weight, and who are making more money, but he continues to work hard and work clean; then he sees the waste and inefficiency and incompetence and that he can’t get ahead. Everyone else seems to be doing better, working less. So he starts to take a little extra. There’s a system in place for that, especially in government, a way to take something here and there and it won’t get noticed. It’s the way it’s always been and everybody else is getting theirs anyway.

—

My mother died when she was thirty. A drunk hit her out on the highway. I remember sitting with my father at the visitation, the weird funeral home room stuffed with people and everyone silent, the closed casket sitting there in front of all of us, and my father looking at the casket with an odd expression on his face, a quizzical look, like a man trying to read a sign in a foreign language. “That’s all it takes,” he said and he snapped his fingers with a sound like a whip cracking in the dry air.

He boxed up all of my mother’s things only a few days after the funeral, all of her clothes, pictures, toiletries, even her toothbrush, everything went into boxes and we carried them down to the basement. “You can always throw something out,” my father said, “but you can’t get it back.” Every single box is still in the basement, unopened. Now I have to deal with them. Now I have to pack up all his things.

My father died a young man, diseased out before he was fifty. I sat in the hospital with him watching him waste away, thinking I wouldn’t be like him. I thought I would be better than him, have a better life.

“It wasn’t so long ago that there’d be a line of people wanting to see me,” my father said, sitting in his hospital room. All the men who came and went from the house, all the people that waited to see him in his office, none of them came now. No one came to the hospital but me. “People do what they can,” I said.

“People do what they can get away with,” my father said. “Like you. When’s the last time you saw your kid?”

It had been a while. “I’ll get over there as soon as you’re out of here,” I said.

“I left a little for the kid,” he said. “In the will.”