Chapter 13: Void

Nobody answered my father.

He came into the blue room and shut the door behind him.

"Ten years," he said. "The test was ten years of work by one boy. You are telling me it was a rich kid's allowance."

"Dad," Bram said.

"Be quiet."

He did not look at Bram. He looked at the paint stirrer on the desk, and then at the urn.

"Then it never counted," he said. "Ellis never earned a dollar of it. He failed."

My mother stood up from the bed.

"He failed?"

"The terms were his own money, Paula. Earned by his own hands. If Bram paid it, the test is void."

"He is dead, Lyle."

"And the trust I set up for him goes back where it came from. To me."

Nobody moved.

I had been dead for days, and I had thought nothing he said could surprise me.

He was standing over my ashes, doing arithmetic.

"You want the trust," my mother said slowly.

"I want what is mine. I built that company with my hands."

"You built it with my forty percent and my father's loan."

"Then you can have your forty percent. You'll get nothing else."

Bram stepped between them.

"Dad, you told me every year where the total stood. You knew where every dollar came from. I'll say so on camera."

My father finally looked at him.

It was the look he gave men across a table.

"You will say what?" he asked. "That you sold forty friends cars at twice their price and told them to pay a boy to kneel?"

Bram's mouth opened.

"That is fraud, son. That is a dozen civil suits and a bank examiner. Every one of those men will say you lied to him. They will say it under oath."

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