But I didn’t stop there. I put on another eight pounds in March. Then another twelve in April. And as of three days ago, I was two hundred and fifteen pounds, which was forty more than I usually carry on my six-foot frame.
That was the day Harold died.
You would think it would have been cancer or emphysema that got him in the end. I mean, he did smoke two packs of cigarettes every day for fifty years. At least that’s what he said. But not everything Harold Humphries said was true, and you had to take some of his admissions, stories, and anecdotes with a grain of salt. For instance, when he confided in me that he was voted “Most Handsome” his senior year in high school. Granted, I only saw what he looked like seventy years later, but it was hard to believe the wrinkled, spotted, Gollum-ish looking specimen had once been anything in the vicinity of attractive.
I asked him countless times to provide evidence to this fact—a photo, a drawing, a bronze bust—but he never complied.
Now I’m not saying the old guy was a liar. I’m just saying he was prone to the occasional hyperbole. Winning $10,000 at the racetrack in 1967 might have only been $5,000. Or the twelve corndogs he ate at the town fair. I mean, maybe it was only ten.
All that being said, the most important story—the story of how he met his first wife and how he gave their baby daughter up for adoption when his wife died during childbirth—this was true.
I had Harold’s and my DNA tested against each another. Harold was my maternal grandfather. The little girl he gave up for adoption was my mother.
Anyhow, like I said, it wasn’t the cigarettes that got him. It was, of all things, his beloved ducks.
Each day at lunch, Harold would get two pieces of bread from the cafeteria, and he would make his way out to the little pond in the courtyard of the nursing home. He had one of those steel walkers with the tennis balls on the bottom, and you could watch Braveheart in the time it took him to walk out there. He would sit on the wooden bench near the pond and toss bits of bread to the ducks. He would always try to throw the bread between two of them and hope for a bit of a wrestling match. That would always get him going.
Three days ago, Harold was feeding the ducks when apparently one of the ducks hopped up on the bench next to him and stole an entire piece of bread. I didn’t have to be there to know this would have thrilled Harold beyond words. And he would have laughed and laughed and laughed, and then he would have died.
He was ninety-two years old.
I was numb when the phone call came. I always expected I would have time to say goodbye, that he would catch pneumonia or something and I would get a week to prepare. That I would be able to tell him how much the last couple years meant to me. Though, in hindsight, it was better he went out the way he did. No suffering. Just sunshine, ducks, and laughter. We should all be so lucky.
Still, it hurt.
Still, three days later, I was raw.
There was a knock at the door and I craned my neck up off the sofa. I wasn’t expecting visitors, nor had I had a visitor in many months.
I pushed myself up with a grunt and plodded in my bear claw slippers to the front door. I was also wearing gray sweatpants and a Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt, size XXL. There was a grape jelly stain on the front of the sweatshirt that looked remarkably like Texas.
So yeah, I looked good.
I pulled the door open.
“Mr. Prescott?” inquired a gentleman in a tan overcoat. He was holding a blue umbrella, which shielded him from the unremitting Seattle drizzle.
I didn’t acknowledge I was or was not this Prescott fellow.
“I’m Mark Jones with Hershey and Associates,” the man said. Mark was fortyish and trim.
“You look a little old to be selling candy bars,” I told him.
“Hershey and Associates the law firm.”
“So, no Mr. Goodbars?”
He ignored me.
Sometimes this is best.
He did say, “Our firm represents the estate of Harold D. Humphries.”
My throat constricted at the sound of Harold’s name, a python tightening around my Adam’s apple like a vice.
“May I come in?” he asked.
I sidestepped and he entered. Still dazed, I led him to the kitchen. I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you want something to drink?”
He declined.
“I would offer you some waffles, but I’m down to my last six boxes.”
He seemed slightly thrown by this statement and shook his head. He set a briefcase on the kitchen island and snapped it open. He said, “Your name came up in the will.”
My eyebrows jumped. “Really?”
My first thought was that it had something to do with my mother, maybe her birth certificate or some baby pictures or some other memorabilia.
Mark the Lawyer handed me a piece of paper. After quickly skimming it, I gazed up.
“You had no idea?” he asked.
“No…I mean, no.” I shook my head. “Why didn’t he give this to his kids? Why me?”
Mark shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. But, if you don’t want it, I’m sure they will. Those two have been calling nonstop for the last forty-eight hours trying to get their hands on the will.”
Harold had a son and a daughter. The daughter was somewhere out east and the son down in Portland. In all the times I visited Harold, easily more than a hundred, I never encountered either of them. I once asked Harold if it would be okay if I got in touch with them, as they were technically my aunt
