I began to work with our local Office on Aging, trying to identify mental health services that might reach out to you. I had been told by a social worker that they had an elder mental health officer who might be able to evaluate you. But I knew age was only part of your mental state. You were also traumatized by the threats and harassment.

You still refused to have the phone number changed, even after all this; but after one of the shouting matches with the Jamacian, you asked Mother to please turn off the phone and leave it off.

This was a refreshing change from the night I came in and found you on the couch, in a lather, with about six cell phones in front of you. “Which one of these damn things works?” you demanded to know. I asked where they had come from. You said you had bought them. Most were un-activated pay-as-you-go phones. I wasn’t about to tell you how to activate them! “I have a working cell phone!” you insisted. It was true, you did. You kept it in your truck, the battery never charged, in case of emergencies. It was gone from your truck. We never found out what happened to it, but my reading had told me that the sudden concern over having a cell phone was because the Jamaican had convinced you that he needed a more private way to contact you, without your family knowing. Case histories said that these scammers often convinced their victims that the reason families were so alarmed by the scam activity was that wives and children wanted the money for themselves. So they gas-lighted the victim into setting up secret methods of contact. You reinforced this belief by growling, “None of your damned business!” when I asked why you suddenly needed a cell phone.

After the go-round with the phone number, things were quiet again for about six months. You stopped answering calls coming from 876 area codes. Mother and I thought things were done, now that you told them you wanted to be left alone. Without a willing participant, they can’t get money. We thought that, eventually, they would give up.

We thought wrong. One day in May, 2013, you answered one of the half-dozen calls you were getting daily; and it all resumed. Once they’d heard your voice again, they became like sharks tasting blood in the water. They swarmed. They called ten times a minute. You couldn’t resist answering. One of them told you he was a Federal agent investigating you for money laundering. You stopped sleeping, we couldn’t stop you from answering the phone, and you started sending them money again. You were still driving, at this point, and you would leave the house unannounced on your quests to purchase VHS tapes at Wal-Mart (the only place retro enough to still sell 10-packs of VHS tapes in 2013) and to send money to Jamaica via Western Union. You just wanted them to leave you alone, and you thought that one day they would have enough of your money that they’d grant you that wish. You didn’t know what I was reading in the papers, that people your age had paid as much as a half million dollars to these scammers, in that same hope of ending the harassment, and still achieved no peace.

MAY 9th, 2019

Dear Daddy–

I still find them occasionally, as I clean up a corner in the house, or go through a box of papers. Most of them try hard to look like official communications from some government office, or legal documents from an attorney. They often have addresses in New York– God only knows how often I’ve looked up those addresses on Google Maps, to see what was actually there!–and they often have checks inside them, made out for obscenely large amounts.

It’s time to talk about them. It’s time to talk about the scams.

April 10, 2019

Dear Daddy–

It’s been another busy week–or how many days?–since I wrote last. Taxes still loom over me. I have to delay paying until my next paychecks come tomorrow, and then I have to scrape together enough money to keep my credit card from maxing out completely. I really hate that I’ve got a maxed-out card. I don’t think I’ve ever had one. But I didn’t quite expect a $9,000 tax liability. And Lazarus still needs medical care, even though he’s healthy for an old man. Two visits this month for antibiotics to kick a UTI–you can relate!–and he needs a lump removed from his neck. Not helping lower that debt.

I own your truck now. Did I tell you that? Hard to remember. I do feel age creeping into my brain. It’s hard to know what I’ve said and what I haven’t, and I’m often asking people to repeat themselves, not because I’m hard of hearing, but because I just can’t process what they’ve said to me. I need to hear it again. Anyway, I just loaded up your truck with about a quarter of the waste wood from my old deck. I think I’ll hold onto it for a while, as some of it came in handy building Mother’s ramp. I’m going to drive it over and store it behind your garage, though.

March 5, 2020

Dear Daddy—

When did I last write? I don’t know. Months. Not good months. No one is to blame. Life gets too busy to handle. One person’s anxieties clash with another person’s anxieties. Changing life situations catch us by surprise and make the ground beneath our feet seem unstable. We take it out on each other.

There has been little to no progress on the house since I last wrote. I take that back. Christian has organized the tools. Ethan and Christian have cleaned up the basement, actually trying to reclaim it as usable space. Ethan unearthed two lab cabinets that you have bought decades ago. I remember carrying them into the room I think of as the “lab” room. It contains the water tank, the darkroom, the electrical panels and phone interface. It also has your workbench that you built in the 1960s with your own hands. It has the bloody (literally, as I recall) steel lab bench with the transite top that we bought from Sacred Heart Hospital. And it has lots, and lots and lots of oscilloscopes. And one last b-52 gunsite. Oh, and, yes, one more missile.