A horrible thought hit Josiah, and he unfolded one leg to put a foot on the floor. “What iftheywon’t let me know if something happens to them?”
Dr. Jarvis chuckled. “I think it’s safe to say they know how you’d feel about that and would let you know about anything as soon as possible.”
After a few long seconds, Josiah huffed out a breath, smiling. “Yeah. I mean… you’re not wrong there.”
“So trust them, and trust that if something happens to you and you won’t be able to contact them, that they’ll understand that as well. They know you like you know them.”
That was the main take from the therapy session, and when he watched Denny and Sammie leave the house the next day, he tried to not feel so twitchy.
In the end he decided to do some more bookkeeping on Thursday, just because Friday evenings were always loud and most Friday shifts flew by in a haze of serving and communicating with the patrons. He liked the weekends, he really did, but it had started to feel as if it took him more time to recover from the busiest nights nowadays. He wasn’t old, he knew that, but he’d done this thing most of his adult life, and he’d seen it all.
So of course, while he waited for news for Sammie to land first and then Denny much later, his phone rang with an unknown number in the early afternoon.
His heart started to beat fast, and he tried to remind himself that it could be a supplier whose number he hadn’t saved on his cell, or something else. Nothing needed to be wrong with his friends!
“Josiah Hall speaking,” he managed to say, barely.
“Mr. Hall, this is Zoe Garcia from Marion, Oregon. I’m a family law attorney for Gary and Theresa Hall. Could you confirm your relationship with the Halls?”
Blinking in confusion and the whiplash of emotions, he uttered, “I don’t have a relationship with them, but they’re the people on my birth certificate.”
She gasped with obvious surprise and then coughed once. “Right, so they are your… biological parents?”
“Yes.” He realized he was pacing and frowned before stopping to sit on the couch. “What’s this about?”
“Well, there’s no easy way to say this, Mr. Hall, but your parents have passed away, and I’m managing their estate based on their wills.”
Josiah felt too much and nothing at all at once. His throat clicked. He realized she was waiting for him to say something, so he went with, “I-I haven’t spoken to them in twenty years. I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s understandable.”
“I… when? How? They weren’t that old?” Those were logical questions, right?
She shuffled some papers. “Your mother passed away five years ago. It was breast cancer they caught too late. Your father… he lived alone, and it appears that he might’ve passed away sometime in the last couple of weeks, but nobody quite knows when exactly. So far, they’ve gathered that it might have been ten days ago and was probably natural causes of some sorts. I have his medical file here that suggests that he had a heart condition and diabetes that he wasn’t always taking care of after your mother passed away.”
The information made sense, but it also rushed over him like a massive wave that left him bereft and confused. “Uh… can you maybe email me all those things? And… and let me know what’s needed next?”
“Of course. I know this is a lot. How about I send you everything and you can call me tomorrow or on Monday? There’s no real rush here, whenever you’ve processed the news, okay?” She sounded kind now, which both annoyed and reassured him a little.
“Okay. Sounds good.” He gave her his email and ended the call. Then he sat on the couch alone for maybe twenty minutes before the phone beeped.
I landed fine. Dad picked me up. Ttyl.
At least Sammie was safely at her destination. He hoped he could hold on until Monday, because he needed Denny there.
He needed to look through the email and call Dr. Jarvis. If he could only make sense of the feelings roiling inside him.
He let the kids know he wasn’t going to come in, citing a headache from hell—something he’d had a few times before, so nobody questioned it, although Drea snarked something about him getting lazy now when he wasn’t living and breathing the bar all the time. He loved them all so much.
Unable to eat, Josiah printed out the documents in the email and started to scan them at the breakfast table.
From what he could tell, it was all like the attorney had said. His parents had sold the car dealership after Mom had fallen ill, and they’d stayed together through it all. They had tried chemo and all the other stuff, but it had been way too late and she’d passed five years ago at sixty-three.
The attorney—he had to check the signature on the email to remember she was called Zoe Garcia—had added a very honest and direct explanation of what had happened to his dad and what some of the neighbors had said.
The old man had turned into a hermit after his wife died. He’d not left the house much, and the neighbors had started to see him less over the last five years. And then couple of days ago someone had realized they hadn’t seen him for over a week.
Someone called in a welfare check, and there they were now.
