A Fighting Chance

Not long after we moved to Austin, my oldest brother, Don Reed, received terrible news: his wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with leukemia. For twenty years, Don Reed had lived the life our father had always dreamed of—he was an air force pilot, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After moving around for all those years to wherever the air force sent them, including six years when he was sent back and forth to Vietnam, Don Reed and Nancy had finally bought a home and settled down in Grapevine, Texas. Now Nancy was sick—really sick.

Mother, Daddy, Bruce, and I drove to San Antonio every few days to visit her at the military hospital, and I doubled down on my prayers. Nancy was determinedly cheerful, but one day she grabbed Bruce’s sleeve and spoke to him in hushed tones, asking him to write her a will. She wanted Don Reed and the boys to know how her possessions—her wedding ring, her piano, her share in her daddy’s farm—should be divided up and where she wanted to be buried. She told Bruce not to worry about her. She just wanted to take care of my brother and their boys, leaving them with no questions and no doubts. A few days after she signed the will, she died.

My brother John had his own health troubles. He had worked construction nearly all his life, and as he approached fifty, the wear and tear on his body was starting to add up. Then the oil bust of the early 1980s wiped out a lot of new construction projects in Oklahoma, so jobs were much harder to come by.

David had also been hit hard when the market for oil collapsed. Over the years, he had built a business that delivered various supplies to oil rigs dotted across the state. The oil boom had made him rich, but the bust brought his business crashing down. He always said that he’d be fine if his customers could pay him, but they were out of money, too. He still got up at four thirty in the morning and worked himself into the ground, but he couldn’t save his business. The forces that swept away billions of dollars in wealth around the globe wiped out my brother as well.

We knitted our multigenerational, multicity family together. Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee still helped out with the kids, although they did less babysitting and more driving here and there. We cooked together a couple of times a week. Now that Don Reed was a widower, he visited us more often, and holidays involved all three brothers and their families. David’s daughter was just a little older than Amelia, so she came to stay during summer vacations. We helped one another in whatever ways we could.

Mother worried about my brothers and me—that was always her way. But Daddy enjoyed watching my career begin to take wing. Unlike Mother, Daddy never seemed to worry that I would ruin my children because I was a Working Mother or that I would end up single and miserable. In truth, I think he found it pretty miraculous that his baby girl had ended up in the world of colleges, libraries, and tree-lined campuses. He was glad to tell people I was a law professor and, if given half a chance, happy to tell them that I wrote articles and gave speeches and won teaching awards. He was proud that I made good money and nearly busted his buttons the first time I was quoted in the newspaper.

But the part Daddy had a hard time with was talking about money and, especially, bankruptcy. For years after I first began teaching that part of the law, I don’t think my daddy ever spoke the word bankruptcy, at least not when I was around. Whenever one of my uncles or the guy at the hardware store asked what my speeches were about, I noticed that Daddy would look off and say something like “Oh, she’s special, that one. We never had to worry about her.” And then he would move on to something else.

Maybe it was personal. My daddy and I were both afraid of being poor, really poor. His response was never to talk about money or what might happen if it ran out—never ever ever. My response was to study contracts, finance, and, most of all, economic failure, to learn everything I could.

My daddy stayed away from big sores that hurt. I poked at them.

When “Dead Broke” Is a Step Up

As I dug deeper into my study of bankruptcy and the new law, I kept bumping into the same question over and over: Why were people going bankrupt? I couldn’t find solid answers anywhere. In those days, almost all young law professors specialized in theory. They wrote articles and books about the theory of this and the philosophy of that. But theory wouldn’t provide answers that anyone could count on, answers that would explain what had gone wrong. I clung to the idea that the people in bankruptcy were different and everyone else would be safe. I might not have said so at the time, but I think I was on the lookout for cheaters and deadbeats as a way to explain who was filing for bankruptcy.