“I’m looking for a Mr. Moses Gilfoy,” said the man who had just arrived at the construction site. “Do you know where I can find him?”
“He’s in the bottom of that hole,” I said, pointing. “The workers are digging a septic tank.”
“Are you Mr. Moses Gilfoy from Burrell Boom?”
“Yes,” Moses said. “Who are you?”
“I’m John Carruthers, a lawyer from England. Is your mother’s name Wilma and your father’s name Stanford?”
“That’s me.”
“Mr. Gilfoy, you had an uncle that you did not know of in England. He died last month and left you a sixty-thousand-pound inheritance.”
“What?!”
“That’s approximately seventy-five thousand dollars in U.S. money.”
“Drinks are on me tonight,” Moses said to the crew. “Let’s spend that money.”
All of that happened at the beginning of last year. We saw Moses off at the airport for a trip to England and we didn’t see him again until last month. He showed up at our job site last week and asked for his old job back.
Mario said, “Moses, how you manage to spend all of that money in a year?”
“A year? That money ran out a month ago. I spent the last month drying out and recovering.”
“Yeh, you do look a little bit ragged,” Mario told him.
Yesterday the lawyer, Carruthers, showed up again on the jobsite looking for Moses.
“Mr. Gilfoy, I have some good news for you,” he said to Moses.
“What’s that?”
“From that same branch of your family in England, your aunt died and left you forty thousand pounds.”
Moses shook his head sadly and said, “Mr. Carruthers, I can’t take the money.”
“Why?”
“It’s ‘cause I ain’t strong like I used to be and I don’t think I could spend that much money and live through it.”
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