Money Talks

Me and Dad in St Augustine, FL, circa 2001

When I was around 3 or 4, before I entered Kindergarten, I became convinced that I would never learn to read. My illiteracy, I went on to reason, would eventually lead to me never graduating high school, certainly never going to college, and most definitely never getting a job. On a particularly rainy Saturday, I panicked about this and was, according to my father, inconsolable.

My father, while not a heavy reader, loved words in his own way. He worked the crossword puzzle in the paper every day in ink with his Cross pen. Woe to the person who tried to get the paper and work that puzzle before him. It was simply not done. Later in life, I would go behind him and correct mistakes and try to finish the puzzles and that was also not well received. 

As a lover of words and someone who could never stand to see me cry, my father did the only thing he could think to do that day: he drove me to the nearest open bookstore and bought me a phonics book. This was a harder task in the 70s than it is today. I still remember it had an owl on the cover. We went home and he helped me sound out the phonemes there in the living room as the rain poured down. He had learned to read with the Dick and Jane books and a ruler to the back of the hand at the one room Halls Hill School, so I think this was probably a pretty big deal for him. 

I don’t remember actually learning to read that day, but I do remember my father taking me to that bookstore and trying his best to help me. I remember feeling taken care of. And the way my father knew to take care of people was with money. 

Doting on me was something my father was particularly good at, and that certainly wasn’t the first time he had done whatever he could to make me stop crying or solve one of my problems with cash. When I was around that same age, my mother came home with me from the mall and said she gave up trying to make me try on Easter dresses. She said I would pull a “starfish,” stretching out and locking all my limbs, making it impossible to get a garment on or off me. 

My father, always up for a challenge, not only took me to the mall that same day, he brought me back home with a dress. What he didn’t tell my mother until years later was that he had just offered me $20 to put it on and wear it. Money talks. I learned that from my dad. 

As an adult, it’s almost inconceivable to me that my father filed bankruptcy twice before he was 60 and managed to make the money back both times. He just never gave up. I try to think of losing everything I have, with four children and a spouse, and I can’t do it.  Hell, I can’t imagine doing it without four children and a spouse. I can’t imagine losing a financial planning business and immediately starting a landscaping business and then becoming a real estate agent, builder and developer. But that’s what he did. 

I don’t remember ever going without in my childhood. I do remember the trauma of the second bankruptcy, mostly because it happened just before my senior year of high school and I was a teenager and totally shitty about it. Also, my mother sold my entire collection of Nancy Drew books at a yard sale during the move. Some things are unforgivable. 

What I learned from all of this, both directly and indirectly, was that money was safety and money solved problems, but money was also temporary and you could never have enough and you could never be certain you could keep what you had. To say I have issues with financial insecurity would be putting it mildly. 

My father would continue to try to pay down my problems the rest of my life. This was the direct part of my lesson on money. When I broke up with my first real boyfriend in college, he held a $100 bill in front of my face and told me he would give it to me if I would just stop crying. I had been crying for days. I really wanted that money, but I was also really heartbroken. Here, my father’s theory broke down: money couldn’t solve this problem. 

The other problem my father couldn’t solve with money was my mother. I think his money kept her happy for a really long time, but the thing I figured out before my dad was that my mother would never really be completely happy. When she finally got what she always wanted, a condo on the water in Florida, she immediately left my dad for her friend’s handyman. After over 30 years of marriage. Go figure. 

My father did everything he could to get her back and these things mostly involved money. He bought her a brand new car, he gave her almost all of his cash, he gave her the income producing properties, and he gave her a quick divorce, thinking she would come to her senses and come back to him. 

She did not. 

To say my father’s heart was broken doesn’t even begin to describe his state of mind. He was a lost man. My mother had been his sun and he now had nothing to revolve around. He threatened suicide. He begged me to beg her to come back. He hired a private investigator to follow her new boyfriend. 

He did all of these things even after he found out that my mother had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from his construction business while she kept the books for him. She was able to do this because he trusted her implicitly. He just never checked the accounts. 

Railing about her theft one moment, he would cry like a baby that he missed her the next. I had only seen my father cry one time before my mother left him and that was when his mother died. This was so much worse. 

I was dating the man who would be my husband around this time and my dad decided we all should get out of town and get away from the drama that was my momma. He told me the Bahamas were great and that’s where he really wanted to go. What he didn’t tell me until we arrived was that he and my mom had taken trips to this same place in the Bahamas before I was born. The trip was a total shitshow. 

Dad hardly ever left his room, except to eat and he was listless. He had started smoking again after my mother had left, and as a lung cancer survivor, this was doing a number on his remaining one and a half lungs. 

On the last day of our trip there, not long before he died suddenly, we were having breakfast in the hotel and got into a fight about, what else, money. He said everything was too expensive at the hotel and on the island. My mother had taken everything he’d ever worked for. I countered that he let it go and enjoy the moment. He counter-countered that he couldn’t. All at once, we both realized this fight was not about money. It was about my mother. We had both lost a woman we loved dearly and we couldn’t beg or buy her back. She was too expensive. We couldn’t enjoy the moment we were in because we were both overwhelmed with grief. We stopped fighting and started crying in the middle of the hotel restaurant. 

My future husband was flummoxed, as was the staff. My father was a large man and I am not petite and we were ugly crying in a hotel restaurant in paradise. A very concerned waitress asked us if everything was OK and my Dad looked at her and said, “We’re just missing someone,” and then he paid the breakfast bill and we left. 

I realized in the wake of my father's death several months later that whether he had money or not, he had always been my safety net emotionally. It wasn’t just that he had tried to pay off my problems, it was that that was usually the fastest way to make them disappear, whether it was a broken down car, a deadbeat boyfriend, or needing help making rent when I lost my job. Even if it meant him going without, he would help me out. 

My father’s death was like a nuclear bomb going off in my life and my mother was not able to be there for me in the days, weeks, and months that followed. I heard through the grapevine she told my brothers that I had been spoiled my whole life and she would never spend another penny on me. I didn’t care about the money, but I cared about the sentiment behind it. It broke my heart. If money was love and safety, I wouldn’t be getting any from her. 

In some ways she wasn’t wrong about me being spoiled, though.  Having my father there to bail me out financially my entire life kept me from growing up and becoming independent. I didn’t blossom professionally until after his death. I don’t think I had needed to until then. That is not something I am proud of, but it’s something I’ve made peace with. 

If I had a time machine and could go back to when my dad was alive, I like to think there are so many things I would tell him and so many things I would do differently. He died suddenly and sudden death opens the door for a lot of regret and I still have plenty. 

But I also know that I tried to tell him all of those things before he died: that he could live without my mother, that we could still have adventures together, that he didn’t need to worry about me, and that I loved him more than I could ever tell him. 

I still miss him so much sometimes and I still have a come apart every time my car breaks down. “If my dad were here, he’d fix this!” I think as I stamp my feet like a child. 

Ultimately, I realize he is still here with me. He taught me to never give up and to never lose hope. To never be defined by my failures or my successes. He taught me that money talks, but he also taught me that love lasts forever.