“I gave them the world,” he said. “Educations. Houses. Businesses I funded. And in return, they stopped calling except to ask for more, and now they sit in my parlor arguing over my things while I’m still in the house to hear them. I raised three strangers who are waiting for me to die.”
And then, a year ago, a caregiver had come to nurse his sister — a young woman with a sick child and shaking hands, who worked herself to the bone and never once asked him for a thing, who treated a stroke-diminished old woman with genuine tenderness and treated him, when their paths crossed, like a person rather than a payout.
“You have no idea how strange it is,” he said, “to be surrounded by people who love your money and to meet, by accident, one person who doesn’t seem to want any of it. You didn’t flatter me. You didn’t angle. You just did your job with a broken heart and a kind one, and I watched you, and I thought — there. That’s who my wife should have gotten to leave things to. That’s who I wish I’d raised.”
