I don’t know where the bottle of Jack Daniels came from, but I have a guess.

My guess is that Dad went to the liquor store—probably to buy the bottle of Barefoot chardonnay I threw away when I cleaned out his refrigerator—and somehow ended up getting all the way home with a bottle of Tennessee whiskey he hadn’t paid for. Had it been bought by another customer and accidentally placed in his bag? Had he unintentionally shoplifted it? Was this an episode of The Simpsons?

Whatever had happened, it ate at him. He’d received something he hadn’t earned, and this was unacceptable. He’d deprived someone else of something they had earned, and that was even more unacceptable. He mentioned in conversations how much it bothered him. At any rate, at some point—I don’t remember when or why—my brother, my husband, and I had consumed that bottle.

So when we found the second handle of Jack at the bottom of one of Dad’s kitchen cabinets, never opened, bright orange price tag blazing like a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker, I assumed Dad had done what I, as his child, would have: He went back to the same liquor store and purchased a bottle of Jack Daniels. To try to even things up. But also to avoid having to tell the person at the counter, hey, I stole some liquor so can I just pay for it now? Because he’s eighty-four and doesn’t need those kind of problems; he just figured he’d do his best to make it as right as possible. Lower his lifetime ratio of bottles of alcohol stolen to those purchased lawfully.

So as we are wont to do, my brother John and I opened the bottle. We’d spent three days cleaning out Dad’s house once he’d decided—finally and after great consternation on the part of his five children and his ex-wife—after his most recent trip to the hospital, that living in the middle of nowhere by himself was no longer an option.

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