Chapter 4 - The Price of Being His Son
On Monday, I gave my accountant every record involving my parents.
I also changed our internal approval system.
Nobody outside the company could authorize payments.
Not my father.
Not my mother.
Not anyone with my last name.
That decision created an immediate problem.
Dad had been receiving money he apparently depended on.
Mom called before lunch.
“You cut off the property payment?”
“Yes.”
“Your father budgeted around that.”
“That sounds like his problem.”
“You agreed to help him.”
“I agreed to pay back thirty thousand dollars. I paid back thirty thousand dollars.”
“He gave you more than money.”
There it was again.
The invisible debt.
Mom began listing everything Dad had done for me.
He let me use the garage.
He introduced me to my first commercial client.
He watched Rebecca when she was a baby.
He helped repair my first service van.
Every kindness had apparently been entered into a ledger I had never seen.
“Did you know he forged my signature?”
Silence.
“Helen?”
I rarely called my mother by her first name.
She hated it.
“Your father did what he thought was fair.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
She hung up.
That afternoon, my accountant found another irregularity.
The original $30,000 loan had indeed been repaid.
Every dollar.
But after the final payment, Dad continued receiving transfers from my personal account for another fourteen months.
I remembered those transfers.
Mom told me they were repayments for property taxes Dad had advanced on a small parcel we once discussed developing together.
The project never happened.
I assumed the transfers were settling my share of preliminary expenses.
The total was $11,200.
My accountant found no corresponding property expenses.
Now I had more than $27,000 in questionable payments.
I could afford the loss.
That wasn’t the point.
Dad knew that.
He had counted on it.
That evening Rebecca sat beside me while I reviewed statements.
“Are Grandpa and Grandma mad at us?”
“At me.”
“Because we stopped working?”
I closed the laptop.
“No.”
She watched me carefully.
“Grandma said rich people get selfish.”
I almost laughed.
Nobody who had seen my mortgage, payroll, equipment loans, and three children would describe me as rich.
But my parents apparently did.
Then Rebecca said, “Grandma told Aunt Laura you were supposed to pay for her roof too.”
May you like
Laura was my older sister.
And I had never heard anything about her roof.
