Because looking at the number means knowing what it cost him.
A pension, split two ways, for seventeen years, by a man who did not buy himself a new coat after 2011 and who told me the old one was better made.
School shoes. A laptop in 2019. Four hundred dollars for a trip to Washington when I was fifteen that I now understand he did not have.
He never once mentioned any of it, in seventeen years, including during arguments, which is a restraint I did not notice until I was about twenty.
And once you know that, you owe it. And you cannot ever pay it, because he will not take it, because he is him.
So I did not look. For four years, as an adult, with a job, I did not look.
He did the paperwork in 2021 entirely on his own.
He found the solicitor. He worked out the one-dollar mechanism, which is not obvious and which I have since been told is the sort of thing people get wrong. He drove himself eleven miles to an office.
He was seventy-seven years old. And then he drove home, and made dinner, and said nothing about any of it for three years.
It has been eleven months since that morning.
They did not fight it. Not one letter from a solicitor, in eleven months. There is nothing to fight; the recording exists and the deed is three years old and the lawyer explained all of it in about nine minutes.
I did not throw them out that morning. I have been asked why about forty times.
I let them unload the truck first.
Three hours, in the drive, in the cold, putting everything back.
Because a loaded truck has to be emptied somewhere, and because I was not going to pay for it, and because the movers were owed their money and it was not their fault.
I made them tea. All four of them, including my father, who took the cup and said thank you and did not once look at me.
That is the strangest ninety seconds of my life and I would do it again.
