This fiction is in response to the joint contest by @theinkwell and @dreemport. Find the post here and join in on the fun!
Too Late To Change
Dad was upstairs in his bed, the place his whole world had narrowed to in the past six weeks. Bone cancer was making short work of his quality of life and it was breaking my heart.
My wife and I had moved in to take care of Dad and keep him at home per his wishes. The additional services of Hospice in the past week had been a big help. What wasn’t a big help was Tina, this was her first visit since we had been here taking care of Dad even though she lived only 10 miles away. We, on the other hand, had left our home 300 miles away to be here.
“Bro, come get me, I wanna spend a few days with my Daddy,” Tina had wheedled on the phone yesterday. I agreed (with trepidation) to pick her up. She came down the stairs from her apartment lugging 2 black garbage bags and instructed me to go back up and get the rest.
“What the heck is all this, Tina?”
“Figured might as well use Daddy’s machine an’ do my laundry while I’m there. He don’t mind long as I bring my own soap.”
I groaned inwardly and trudged up the narrow stairs to bring down the rest of her laundry. As I threw them in the trunk I saw what else she had packed for her stay, including a handle of vodka. This wasn’t going to end well.
On the way over I tried to lay down some ground rules.
“You have to stay strong, Tina. Dad doesn’t want any crying and carrying on, just keep that to yourself when you’re with him. He’s in a lot of pain even with all the meds and he’s tired and weak so take it easy.”
Tina bounded up the stairs and bolted into Dad’s room. She burst into tears and flung herself at his chest. “Oh shit Daddy! What am I gonna do without my Daddy?” She wailed harder. “Everybody leaves me! You can’t die on me Daddy!”
Dad gathered his breath and patted her weakly on the shoulder. “Now hush that talk baby-girl. We all got to go someday. It’s going to be all right.”
But the theatrics continued until Dad said “Tina, you need to go on out of here and get yourself together. I need to rest now.”
Tina reluctantly left his bedside and headed for the basement. She stuffed in the first load of her laundry while swigging straight from the bottle she’d brought. As the pile of laundry went down so did the level of vodka in the bottle.
The next thing I knew Tina was outside in the front yard walking back and forth, swinging the bottle by the handle and muttering and crying. She sank to the sidewalk and rolled over on her back and kicked her feet up and down. She was screaming and crying “Oh Lord, why you do this to me? Why you takin’ my Daddy?”
Neighbors were coming out their front doors and looking at her. A young man walking his dog ran over to ask her if she was all right. Someone will be calling 9-1-1 next. I flew out the front door and got her to stand up. “Come on in the house, Tina. I know this is hard, let’s go sit down and talk.”
I finally got her back inside but the drama only continued. Now the vodka bottle was empty, but no more laundry had been done.
Tina was on a new mission.
“Mine!”
“Mine!”
“Mine!”
Tina moved jerkily around the room sticking imaginary Post-it Notes on various articles in the basement while I looked on in disgust and wondered again if this could really be my half-sister, only recently introduced to me in the previous year.
“You know all this gonna be half mine, Bro, cause Daddy told me so. I need his car too cause you already got two and I ain’t got none.”
This wasn’t quite the way Dad had told me, but our discussions on the matter had been limited, I really didn’t want to talk about it in our previous time together. After all, he was a healthy, virile 80 year old and we had plenty of time for that kind of talk. Or so it had seemed.
Tina eventually put up such a ruckus that night that Dad called me upstairs and said to make her go home, he couldn’t take it. I called her friend to pick her up and basically escorted her against her will outside when her ride came. That was the last time she came to see Dad.
The next day he apologized to me, as if it were his fault the way Tina had acted, but I tried to smooth things over and say she was just upset and not handling things well. He told me I was in charge of everything when he went (I already knew he’d name me executor but not the details of the will) and that he had named Tina as a 20% beneficiary on the life insurance policy. He said I could give her part of the CD in the bank, but he didn’t want me to give it to her all at once. He knew she would not put the money to good use.
A week later Dad was gone. When we opened the safe deposit box, we found that in spite of what he’d said to me as his final wishes, the will told a different tale. Tina and I were to split everything 50/50 with me as executor. The will had been made two years ago and it was valid.
In the following months it took to sell the house, hold the estate sale, and run the business through probate court, I had several calls from Tina. Usually when she was drunk or stoned and wanting to know when the money was coming. And could she borrow some until that happened? And what was taking so long?
On August 25th I sent her the estate distribution check.
FaceBook pictures appeared of her new car, a vacation trip with a whole bunch of newfound friends, short videos of drunken partying.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Tina was found in her apartment the victim of an apparent drug overdose.
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