My Parents Chose a Birthday Dinner Over My Family’s Funeral—Then They Asked for Thirty Percent of the $18.7 Million Settlement

Default was not created by my grief or by my refusal to discuss money.

I took the chronology home.

Ruth read it beside me.

“He said they were out of Richmond,” I told her.

“I remember.”

“That he couldn’t come because of the birthday arrangements.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t need him to have been free all day.