“You might want to brace yourself,” my husband said, handing me a small pleather portfolio and shaking off the day’s rain. 

He shook his head as I took the portfolio from him. “Your parents,” he said, his tone both rueful and amused. 

“Lutheran Brotherhood” shimmered in gold lettering on the portfolio’s front. A stack of papers wedged inside propped the portfolio open at least an inch. 

“Did — did you find the missing tax documents?” I asked. 

“I found tax documents,” he said. “But they won’t do you any good.” 

I turned the portfolio over in my hands. Lutheran Brotherhood is a name I know well.  

It sounds like a cult of Protestants with a penchant for the Y chromosome. 

It’s not. 

Lutheran Brotherhood was a financial agency. It provided loans, insurance, and annuities for Lutherans. 

Lutherans like Indy and Willie. 

Late last year, I found Lutheran Brotherhood life insurance policies taken out on me and my brother in the 1980s. 

They were in paper grocery bags in Willie’s spare closet. 

I’m not suspicious of Indy and Willie getting life insurance on us while we were children. 

But. 

There was that time they took my sister’s four-poster bed and stacked it on top of my four-poster bed, creating bunk beds. 

Out of beds never meant to be bunked. 

Nothing secured these beds. They were just piled atop each other like a Dagwood sandwich.  

I never located a life insurance policy on my sister. That maybe explains why the counterfeit bunk beds were eventually disassembled. 

I thought this Lutheran Brotherhood portfolio might contain the life insurance on my sister. Or forgotten annuities I could use to take care of Willie. 

“Where did you find this?” I asked. 

The answer was obvious. My husband now drives Willie’s car. Cars are where Indy and Willie keep all of their important documents. 

And dead sibling’s ashes. 

And vials of mercury. 

Mercury. I have such a story about mercury. I don’t want to oversell it, but mercury played a significant role in my relationship with Indy. 

Anyway. 

I opened the portfolio, sorting through the documents inside. 

A half dozen mortgage documents from four different, now-defunct banks were folded into haphazard thirds. They were all for the same house — the house I grew up in. 

The house Indy and Willie sold in 2019. 

The mortgages began in 1970. The last one was dated 1999.  

I wasn’t even born in 1970. By 1999, I was eyeing an apartment and flirting with that cute guy from my Advanced Pathophysiology class. 

He’s still cute. 

Even when he hands me portfolios from Willie’s old car. 

I don’t know why Indy and Willie had so many mortgages for one house. But it sure does explain a lot about the condition of their finances when I got ahold of them four years ago. 

Don’t worry. I fixed it. 

Next, I found a bill of sale for our 1981 Datsun hatchback and 1985 Plymouth Voyager. 

“We bought the Voyager,” I explained to my husband, “when Willie totaled the ’81 Datsun on a telephone pole after she fell asleep coming home from night shift.” 

“I thought your dad totaled the Datsun when he hooked it to the pop-up camper that hydroplaned in Virginia?” my husband replied. 

That, I explained to my husband, was the 1980 Datsun Hatchback. It was replaced by the ’81. Which was then replaced by the Voyager. 

A little car genealogy for you. 

The portfolio also held documents for a 1985 home equity line of credit from yet a fifth bank.  

What did Indy and Willie do with four mortgages and a home equity loan from five banks? Grease palms? Take the cannoli? Sell cigarettes for Paulie? There was an episode of Boardwalk Empire about a mafioso from Willow Grove. Was that Indy and Willie? 

The last thing I found in the portfolio was receipts, separated into two piles, each pile stapled. The receipts were for — wait for it — property taxes. 

From 1970 to 1999. 

Four years after that first tax payment, I was born. Five years after the 1999 tax payment, that cute dude from Pathophys and I had a baby and mortgage of our own. 

My entire childhood. Folded into thirds. Stuffed into a portfolio. Shoved into the pocket of a car.  

Probably by Indy, whose distinctive signature on that paperwork shimmered more than the gold Lutheran Brotherhood stamp. 

“Why?” I said. 

“Why what?” my husband asked. 

The documents, I pointed out, were only dated to 1999.  

Indy and Willie bought Willie’s car — the car where my husband found the portfolio — in 2018.  

What prompted the portfolio’s relocation from wherever it was kept to the pocket of Willie’s car? 

And why were these papers even together anyway? Why keep bills of sale for cars from the Dallas era with mortgage satisfaction paperwork from a house you don’t own anymore? 

And why — why oh why — keep nearly 30 years of property tax records but not the last five years of tax documents for tax returns you still need to file? 

“It’s your parents,” my husband said, by way of explanation. “Just look at the stocks!” 

Oh yeah. The stocks. 

We have so much more to talk about.