I Died Afraid My Broken Arm Burdened Them novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Call
Ellis's father phones to say ten years of poverty was a test and he is an heir. Ellis is already dying; the last deposit lands and someone pounds on the door.
My father called at nine at night to tell me I was rich.
"Ellis? Why are you so quiet? Did the news knock the words out of you?"
He was laughing, and I had not heard him laugh in ten years.
I lay on my mattress with the phone on my chest and the speaker on.
My left arm lay beside it, taped to a paint stirrer. It had been broken for three weeks.
On the table across the room stood an open bottle of pesticide.
I had emptied it an hour ago.
"Everything was a test," my father said. "Your mother's leukemia, my spine, the bills. We invented all of it so you would grow."
I did not answer.
"And you passed. Three million dollars before you turned twenty, with nobody's help. The last transfer cleared a minute ago."
My mother was crying happily behind him.
"Your mother and I own Marden Packaging. Billions in assets. You are our heir."
"We're coming over, sweetheart," my mother called. "Ten minutes."
I stared at the yellow light on the ceiling.
For ten years I had been told the family was poor, and that only my work kept my mother alive.
I hauled scrap at twelve. I delivered food, carried bricks and let men with money laugh at me, and every dollar went to her pills.
"The pills," I said. My voice came out thin. "Nineteen hundred dollars a month, for seven years."
"Vitamins," my father said. "Every cent sat in her account. It's all still there."
"Mom," I said. "Did you ever take one?"
"Every morning, with my orange juice," she said, and laughed through her tears. "Isn't it wonderful? I was never sick at all."
I thought of the morning.
The foreman at the packing plant had looked at my arm and said he could not carry a man with one hand.
I had hidden the break for three weeks, because an X-ray costs money and the pills were due on the fifth.
I had walked home with two hundred and twelve dollars.
A son with a broken arm was one more bill.
So I had decided to stop being one.
"There's more," my father said. "You have an older brother. Bram."
I turned my head on the pillow.
"We spoiled him from the day he was born. He is twenty-four, he burns through millions on cars and watches, and he has never worked a day."
"We could not make you into him," my mother said, closer to the phone now. "We couldn't."
So there had been a house, and a table, and a boy sitting at it.
For all of ten years.
"We had a man look in on you every month," my father said. "His last report said you were doing wonderfully."
I almost told him about my arm.
My mouth would not make the words.
I thought about the money instead.
The biggest payment I ever got was forty thousand dollars, for kneeling on a stranger's driveway while his guests took pictures.
The work offers came from numbers I never saw twice, and they always paid more than the ad said.
Every one ended the same way: Cash for work. No charity.
I took every one of them. I would not take a handout from anyone, and none of those jobs looked like a handout.
My bank sent anything over five hundred dollars to my mother's account on its own, so I never saw a balance.
Three million dollars.
I had never known I was carrying so much.
"You can quit the plant tomorrow," my father said happily. "Tomorrow you sleep in a real bed."
"I'm tired, Dad," I said.
"Of course you are. You've earned it."
Heat rose in my throat.
I tried to say another word, and something dark came up instead.
The pain in my stomach stopped.
Then the room was quiet, and I was standing beside the table, looking at the bed.
A thin boy lay on it with a black mouth and a taped arm.
His eyes were open. His chest did not move.
I knew him by his shoes, because they were the same ones I wore, with the soles coming apart.
"Ellis?" My father's voice came out of the phone on the dead boy's chest. "Ellis, say something."
I put my hand out to the phone.
It went through.
The screen lit up on its own with a message from my bank.
Deposit received: $140,000. Forwarded to: Mother. Total forwarded: $3,000,000.00.
I had never seen a deposit that large in my life.
The sender's line read: Cash for work.
Somebody started pounding on the door.
"Ellis!" a man shouted. "Open up! It's Dale!"
It was not my parents.
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