something can be worked out if you want to go away to school. I know of a client who used part of her eldest son’s 529 for a fancy kindergarten for her youngest. Not that I think twenty thousand dollars a year is a prudent expenditure at that level—the most expensive crayons in Manhattan, surely—! But yes, so you understand, that’s how it works.”
I looked at my dad. “So there’s no way you could, say, wire me sixty-five thousand dollars,” I said. “If I needed it right this minute.”
“No! Absolutely not! So just put that out of your mind.” His manner had changed—clearly he’d revised his opinion of me, no longer my mother’s son and A Good Kid but a grasping little creep. “By the way, may I ask how you happened to arrive at that particular figure?”
“Er—” I glanced at my dad, who had a hand over his eyes. Shit, I thought, and then realized I’d said it out loud.
“Well, no matter,” said Mr. Bracegirdle silkily. “It’s simply not possible.”
“No way?”
“No way, no how.”
“Okay, fine—” I tried hard to think, but my mind was running in two directions at once. “Could you send me part of it, then? Like half?”
“No. It would all have to be arranged directly with the college or school of your choice. In other words, I’m going to need to see bills, and pay bills. There’s a lot of paperwork, as well. And in the unlikely event you decide not to attend college…”
As he talked on, confusingly, about various ins and outs of the funds my mother had set up for me (all of which were fairly restrictive, as far as either my father or me getting our hands immediately on actual, spendable cash) my dad, holding the phone out from his ear, had something very like an expression of horror on his face.
“Well, uh, that’s good to know, thank you sir,” I said, trying hard to wrap up the conversation.
“There are tax advantages of course. Setting it up like this. But what she really wanted was to make sure your father would never be able to touch it.”
“Oh?” I said, uncertainly, in the overly long silence that followed. Something in his tone had made me suspect that he knew my father might be the Lord Vader-ish presence breathing audibly (audibly to me—whether audibly to him I don’t know) on the other line.
“There are other considerations, as well. I mean—” decorous silence—“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but an unauthorized party has twice tried to make a large withdrawal on the account.”
“What?” I said, after a sick pause.
“You see,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, his voice as distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the sea, “I’m the custodian on the account. And about two months after your mother died, someone walked in the bank in Manhattan during business hours and tried to forge my signature on the papers. Well, they know me at the main branch, and they called me right away, but while they were still on the phone with me the man slipped out the door, before the security guard was able to approach and ask for ID. That was, my goodness, nearly two years ago. But then—only last week—did you get the letter I wrote you about this?”
“No,” I said, when at last I realized I needed to say something.
“Well, without going into it too much, there was a peculiar phone call. From someone purporting to be your attorney out there, requesting a transfer of funds. And then—checking into it—we found out that some party with access to your Social Security number had applied for, and received, a rather large line of credit in your name. Do you happen to know anything about that?
“Well, not to worry,” he continued, when I didn’t say anything. “I have a copy of your birth certificate here, and I faxed it to the issuing bank and had the line shut down immediately. And I’ve alerted Equifax and all the credit agencies. Even though you’re a minor, and legally unable to enter into such a contract, you could be responsible for any such debts incurred in your name once you come of age. At any rate, I urge you to be very careful with your Social Security number in future. It’s possible to have a new Social issued, in theory, although the red tape is such a headache that I don’t suggest it…”
I was in a cold sweat when I hung