The latest word on the Helen front is that the old woman wants “the metal box,” the one with the will. Since she’s already declared that I’m “not part of the family,” you can guess where this is going. I really shouldn’t speculate, but it’s so hard not to: the grooves are so well worn.

She’s always used money to control. What makes it work is withholding affection, because that makes for hungry children. Generosity in love, as with finances, shows irresponsibility in the giver. Never lend out more than you receive! Love, like money, is finite in the false world where transcendance is a lie.

As a family lender of last resort, she’d always given out the checks. Need to buy a used car to get to work? Go to Helen if you dare. Over the years, it devolved into a ritual of madness. When she set up her very modest little trust eight years ago, she had figures in mind for how much each of our shares of the “inheritance” should be reduced for gifts of money already handed out. With the Helen loans, everyone started out in a hole. I never put much credence in her figures, but she had them codified in the trust documents. If Helen ever died, as successor trustee, I’d have to start by shorting all the heirs according to this nonsense. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning.

Helen’s attorney made it clear that there were to be no more individual gifts that might upset the “equalized” amounts as stated in the trust. The attorney also drew up a plan for yearly giving that’s in there too, so Helen could help her grownup kids with supplemental income. That’s how she thought of it at the time, but we’re only talking only small amounts: a hundred here, $200 there… And it never was that regular. There was lots more given out occasionally, several thousand here, another thousand there: “to even things out,” but not for everyone. If you hadn’t asked for any recently, then you were “good” and got rewarded. She did give me money once to help pay for my hernia surgery, but only after I asked for it — which made me “bad,” so subsequently I missed out. She never stuck to her attorney’s directions, in other words, which was fine as far as my siblings and I were concerned. But she was erratic and inconsistent, stirring up the muck and pitting one against the other.

To make things even worse, she kept records of it all in a lunatic’s diary, an evil green notebook stuffed with scraps of yellow paper where this gift or that was written down. Her intention was that when she died, the one in charge (presumably me) would add it all up and follow her commandment to cut so-and-so’s allotment by a specified amount. Whenever Helen brought it up, i.e. within the first hour of any visit and in every phone call, I had to promise to faithfully fulfill her wishes. All this was outside the trust, however, and subject to various interpretations. I thought the whole idea was absurd.

The notebook still exists, of course. I saw it when my brother brought it to me early in my final week of hell in Tucson. I know what he wanted me to do, to go through the crumpled hen-scratchings and add everything up, so I could tell him what the bottom line would be. That’s not quite the way it sounds: this brother and middle child, more damaged in some ways than any of us but with a solid loving heart, had long ago literally traded his independence for a symbiotic relationship with Helen that none of us understood or could have weathered. For years Helen had been telling him and anyone else who’d listen that “Johnny has gotten more money than anyone else,” something he wanted to see me confirm. I recognized this as fear that he’d be left out, for he was the hungriest of all.

It was always my intention to follow the letter of the law, according to the will — sorry, you get $20,000 less than she does, etc., etc. — and then to follow up by using property outside the trust to even up the piles, after which I’d liquidate the trust and divide it five ways, just the same for everybody It was the only way to balance the family karma: give everyone as much as I possibly could, in equal shares. If anyone objected because of what the damn green notebook said, I’d let them try to sort through all the mess and come up with adjusted figures, knowing that the exercise would quickly prove my point.

But the whole thing was disgusting and pathetic. You withhold love, because you never got it. And when someone needs a hand, you make them pay. (She’d even started counting birthday and Christmas gifts against our shares.) Every time she raised the subject, I felt I needed purifying afterwards: all this carping, abuse, and fear over an individual fortune roughly equivalent to the cost of a nice car and some dental bills. It was all she ever wanted to talk about, enough to send me screaming down the road.

And now I’m the villain for trying to help. Helen may even disinherit me, such as it is. More than anything, that’s the final punishment in her view, in mine the last gasp of a game to make me shoulder guilt and feel unworthy. Love is money, so being left out = abandonment, which in a child’s heart means he must have done something wrong and should be punished. But I’m different now, and there’s nothing of the guilty son in this equation.

And that, dear reader, is the gold down in the guano…