I never thought the worst day of my life would start with a notary stamp, but there I was, standing in the hallway outside Mr. Patterson’s office on the third floor of Grayson and Associates, holding a manila folder so thick my fingers had gone numb, when my uncle looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Sign everything over, or I will make sure you end up with nothing. And I mean nothing, Callie.”
I had known this man my entire life.
I had called him Uncle David since I was 4 years old. I had eaten his wife’s potato salad at every 4th of July cookout. I had believed, right up until that Tuesday morning in March, that he was the one person keeping our family from completely falling apart after my mother got sick.
I was wrong about so many things. Let me go back to where this really started, because if I jump straight to what happened in that hallway, you won’t understand why it took me as long as it did to see what was right in front of me. And honestly, looking back now, I think part of me didn’t want to see it.
When someone has been in your life forever, when they smell like the same cedar cologne your grandfather used to wear, when they know how you take your coffee and which side of the family you got your stubborn streak from, it’s almost impossible to believe they are capable of something like this. My mother, Linda, was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease 2 months after my 28th birthday. I remember sitting in the neurologist’s office next to her, holding her hand while the doctor spoke, and thinking, this is the moment everything divides into before and after.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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