“Insurance,” Dad said, and I felt every muscle in my body go cold. “I do not know what he meant, sweetheart, but he said it as if it were a grocery list. He said Jason would handle it after you came home from Alaska.” I carry a policy of two million dollars through my hospital group, and for twenty years my father has been the named beneficiary, because my mother asked it on her last day. I held his hand and said nothing, because I have given bad news to a thousand families, and I know how long a silence can be.
Ms. Kovac returned to the hospital at noon with a folder under her arm and a detective from the Boise police named Haas, a tall woman with reading glasses on a chain. In the garage, tucked behind a box of Christmas ornaments, they had found a gift box addressed to me in care of the motel where I was staying in Alaska. It held a bottle of wine, a tin of chocolates, and a handwritten card. The card said, “Rest well, my love. Your last week is almost here.” The chocolates had been opened, filled, and sealed again.
The laboratory tested them that afternoon. Each piece held a heavy dose of the same sleeping medication that had been found in the blood of my father. Detective Haas also had a printout from the laptop of Jason, and what it showed, I will not repeat, except to say that in the six weeks of my contract he had looked up the answer to a single question over and over. How long does an insurance company take to pay when the death looks like an accident? The box was due to be mailed on Monday. I had come home on Saturday.
The finest tenant in the yard turned out to be a wren in a tiny bungalow.
I think about that Saturday often. A cancelled flight, an early release, a pilot who found a gap in the weather. Dad says it was my mother, working from wherever she is. I do not argue with him. The police arrested Jason in a rented cabin outside Twin Falls, drinking coffee on the porch. Todd and Pam were found two days later at a casino in Wendover, Nevada, at a slot machine, using the last of the cash of my father. They were still arguing about who had forgotten to delete the messages.
Jason was charged with attempted murder, aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult, and forgery. At the trial, my father testified from a wheelchair, in a necktie, with a cane across his knees, and he spoke for forty minutes without losing his place. Some of his former students sat in the gallery, dozens of them, grown men and women in their forties and fifties. When the prosecutor asked him to identify the man who had held the pen in his hand, Dad pointed with the cane and said, “That young man. I gave him detention once, and I see I was too lenient.”
The jury took two hours. Jason received twenty years, Todd ten, and Pam eight. I was not in the courtroom for the sentence. I was in the cafeteria of the courthouse, drinking tea from a paper cup and staring at the pattern on the floor. A bailiff came to tell me it was over. I thanked him and asked how many sugar packets one could take before it became a theft, and he laughed, and I laughed, and then I put my face in my hands and let it all out.
My father spent three weeks in the hospital. His kidneys recovered, slowly and stubbornly, like their owner. I sold the house in Boise, the one with the shed in the backyard, and I bought a one story home with wide doorways, a sunroom, and a patch of yard facing the foothills. The contractor built raised garden beds at the exact height of a seated man. Dad supervised every board. When the first tomatoes came in July, he ate one in the garden like an apple, juice running down his chin.
The house in Twin Falls came back to him by order of the court, the deed voided and the dollar returned with a stern notice. Dad rented it to a young third grade teacher named Miss Alvarez, on the condition that she plant a lilac by the porch. I resigned from my travel contracts and accepted a staff position in the emergency department at the big hospital in Boise. Twelve hour shifts, a locker, a coffee machine that actually works. I come home every night to a man waiting in the sunroom with a newspaper.
Former students keep appearing at our door. A bank manager. A state trooper. A woman who now runs a bakery in Meridian and brought a loaf of cinnamon bread still warm from the oven. They stand in the doorway and say, “Mr. Principal, you may not remember me.” He always does. He remembers their locker numbers. He remembers their middle names. He sits them down at the kitchen table and asks them what they are doing with their lives, in the same stern tone he used on the hallway of Capital High in 1984.
Last month, he carved a tiny birdhouse out of cedar. It has a slanted tin roof, a single round window, and a nail on the inside where a small lantern could hang. He painted the door green and hung the house from the oak by the sunroom. I asked him what it was called. “The bungalow,” he said, and his eyes twinkled. A pair of wrens moved in within the week. They sing every morning, and Dad says they are the happiest tenants he has ever had.
