I pressed the button one last time as the lawyer finished speaking.
His name was Gerald Marsh. Calm, compassionate, and experienced, he had the gentle voice of someone who had delivered difficult news many times before. He told me my father had died at 6:14 that morning. He explained that I had been named executor of the estate and that we needed to meet to discuss several important matters. Parenting
“What kind of matters?” I asked.
He paused briefly before answering. “Matters that will require your full attention, Ms. Calloway. When you are ready.”
We arranged to meet on Friday.
My name is Sophie Calloway. I was thirty-seven, working as a hospital administrator in a medium-sized Ohio city I’d moved to at twenty-four and never left. My father, Raymond Calloway, lived forty minutes away in the gray colonial home where I grew up, the one with the bright red front door and the creek behind it that had “eaten” my shoe when I was a little girl—or at least that was the story I insisted on telling.
My parents divorced when I was eleven. Mom remarried and relocated to Phoenix. Dad stayed exactly where he was. He spent the next thirty-two years living in that same house while working as a contractor, adding rooms and decks to other people’s homes while letting his own age comfortably around him. Familysupport groups
I visited every few weeks. We’d have dinner, watch baseball, and argue over things that didn’t really matter. When the conversations became serious, we usually managed to understand each other before the evening ended. Dad wasn’t someone who spoke openly about emotions, but he was always there when it counted, and that mattered more to me than words.
I also had two half-siblings from one of Dad’s later relationships. He never married their mother, Karen, but they remained close for years. Derek was twenty-eight, working for a logistics company in Columbus. Amber was twenty-six, finishing graduate school in education while sharing a house with roommates.
