Travis took his hand out of his pocket slowly, and everybody in that room stopped breathing. It was a phone. His thumb was already moving across the screen, typing, and I understood in that second that he was warning somebody. Mr. Pruitt did not lunge. He simply said, in a pleasant voice, “Detective Alvarez, would you step in, please?” The door opened behind my stepbrother. A broad man in a brown jacket came through and put one hand lightly on the back of the chair of Travis. “I will take that phone, son,” he said. “And I would put my hands on the table where we can see them.”
Mr. Pruitt pushed the play button again. My father returned to the screen, a little paler, in the same brown recliner with the Korean War cap on his head. He looked as if he had practiced this speech a dozen times and expected to be interrupted. “The clinic in Hutchinson is called Prairie Family Health,” he said. “There is no Dr. Ellis. I looked him up with the state medical board in February, and they told me his license number belongs to a dentist in Salina who passed away in 2011. Somebody is using his name to sign prescriptions. I think it is Travis.”
I heard my sister gasp. On the screen, my father picked up a small yellow notebook and opened it. “Seven times since Christmas my sugar has crashed in the night. I have the dates. Every one of those nights, Travis came to dinner, and Sharon fixed my plate. I am not accusing anybody of anything I cannot prove. But Mikey, Annie, you both know me. I have checked my sugar four times a day for thirty years. I do not get sick from my own supper.” He cleared his throat. His eyes shone. “I wanted to believe in her. I truly did.”
A dusty VHS tape from a dying father outed the stepmother, her son, and a doctor who never existed.
Sharon had dropped into her chair. Her face did something terrible, a slow collapse from the top, like a tent losing its pole. She did not look at me or my sister. She looked at the screen, at the man she had married, and she said in a flat voice, “I only wanted it to be over. He was so long dying.” Nobody spoke. Mr. Pruitt did not move. “It was the idea of Travis at the start,” she went on, “the extra insulin. I told myself it was only to make him sleep. To make him quiet. I told myself the lows would not hurt him.”
“Mom,” Travis said hoarsely, “stop talking.” “I am done, honey,” said Sharon. “It is on the tape.” She began to cry, not for my father, I think, but for herself, for the long ugly chain of her choices. Detective Alvarez took her by the elbow, gently, and read her the rights in a low, level voice, and then he did the same for Travis. At the door Sharon turned, and her tissue fluttered to the carpet, and she said to Annie and me, “I really did not think he would die.” My sister answered her so quietly that I almost missed it. “You thought he would stop being inconvenient.”
The medical examiner reopened the file in May. The toxicology from the autopsy, kept sealed for months by order of the county, showed what the tape had said it would. The pharmacy records of Prairie Family Health were seized, and eleven other elderly patients turned out to have been billed for prescriptions they never received. The state board of pharmacy shut the clinic down. Travis took a plea in October and went away for fourteen years. Sharon, who had signed a prenuptial agreement in 2017 and never read it, got twelve, and received not one cent of the insurance.
Annie and I sat in the lawyer office for another two hours after the police left. We did not speak much. We looked at the will, which was shorter than I expected, and kinder. Dad had left the house on Maple Street to us jointly, and his Royals season tickets to my son, and his army cap to Annie. And at the bottom, in his careful print, he had added a single sentence. Take care of each other, because I could not take care of myself. Annie read it and put her face in my shoulder, and I held her for a very long time.
There were eleven minutes left on the tape. Mr. Pruitt asked whether we wanted to see them now or alone. We said alone. We drove to the house on Maple Street and sat on the sofa in front of the old television, and Annie pressed play. It was just my father at the end, in his recliner, looking into the lens. He said he was not angry anymore. He said he was proud of us. He said he had loved our mother until the day she died, and that he had been lonely, and that loneliness is a poor reason to trust the wrong person.
He reached for something just out of frame and held up a small blue pennant. “Mikey,” he said, “the Royals are playing at one in the afternoon. Put it on for me, will you? And call your sister more than you do.” Then the tape ended in snow. Annie started laughing and could not stop, and I laughed too, the way people laugh at the edge of a grave. We turned on the game. We sat in the living room of our father and watched the Royals blow a three run lead in the ninth, and it was the best afternoon I have had in years.
I call Annie every Sunday now. I fly to Wichita four times a year. We kept the tape in a fireproof box beside the sofa, and once a spring we play it, just the last ten seconds, so we can hear him say it. Call your sister. The game starts at one. We never miss the first pitch.
