James had arranged for a financial adviser named Catherine Park. Careful, thorough, and possessed of the useful quality of explaining everything twice without making you feel you had needed her to. We sat for 3 hours on our first meeting. I told her about Roland and the porch and the hydrangeas and about what I believed money was actually for.
She listened. Then she helped me make a plan. The house on Carver Street stayed mine. That was never in question. I paid for a full renovation of the back porch. New lumber, new railing, Roland’s original design reconstructed from an old photograph. I put a new roof on Dorothy’s house, which she protested vigorously for approximately one afternoon before accepting.
I established a scholarship fund at the Columbus Public School, where I had once volunteered as a reading tutor in Roland’s name, annually renewed, for students who needed it. I made a significant donation to Grace Methodists legal advocacy fund which helped elderly and lowincome people navigate exactly the kind of situation I had just survived.
I had seen the files of people who had not had a James Whitmore or a Ununis Garfield. I thought about what had happened to them. I booked two first class seats to Dublin for September. When I called Dorothy to tell her, she cried, which was the only time I had ever heard Dorothy Haynes cry. As for Derek, Garland had sent a letter suggesting a possible civil suit.
James responded with something he described as comprehensive. The suit did not materialize. Derek called me once, two weeks after the ruling. When I answered, he was silent for a long moment and then said only quietly, ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘Derek.’ We sat in that silence that holds everything too large and too broken to speak. And then the call ended.
I did not call back. What I decided was this. I was not going to close the door forever because closed doors are heavier to carry than open ones. and I am 74 years old and I am not interested in heavy things anymore. But I was also not going to walk through it on anyone else’s timeline. If Derek ever found his way to something true, not apology as strategy, but the real kind, the kind that cost something, then perhaps there would be a conversation.