“Obligations that have to be taken care of.”

I looked at the closed cover of the ledger.

Arthur had always tracked his retirement funds to the exact penny.

“Are you and Mom okay?” I asked.

“We’re fine,” he said gruffly.

“But you can’t keep pulling water from a dry well forever.”

He opened the ledger again and made a small check mark next to a date from last Tuesday.

“There was a withdrawal of eleven thousand four hundred dollars just this past week,” he said.