Part Two

Seven years after my grandmother taught an entire family what their character was worth, a hospital called me at two in the morning about my father. By the end of that month I had a list in front of me — competency evaluations, financial restrictions, managed care — and I recognized every line on it, because I had read it out loud in her living room as an accusation.

Chapter 9 — Do Not Call

The call came at 2:14 on a Tuesday morning in March.

“Is this Claire Whitaker? I’m a social worker at Denver Health. We have a gentleman here, Richard Whitaker, sixty-eight. Police brought him in about an hour ago.”

A pause with paper in it. “Ma’am, your number is the only one in his phone.”

I sat up in the dark of a townhouse I had paid cash for with my grandmother’s money and said, “That can’t be right.”

It was right. Denver PD had found him in the parking structure on Wynkoop at eleven forty at night in a cardigan and no coat, walking the fourth level, pressing a key fob at every dark sedan he passed.