And he took it out of the college account.
All of it — the three thousand four hundred that was in there by that October, which was fourteen months of whatever was left at the end of the month — and then everything on top of it.
And he took a Saturday job at a builders’ merchant in the January of 2014 and kept it until I left, and he told my mother it was because he was bored at weekends.
And there were two things about that car in those two years that I did notice and did not think about, and I want them in, because I was not blind. I was seventeen, which is different.
One. I never got a bill for anything.
Not the insurance, not the tax, not the service in the March of 2015 that cost four hundred and eleven dollars.
A brand-new car in my name for two years and I never once opened an envelope about it.
And I remember, vaguely, understanding that Hollis “sorted” it, in the way you understand at seventeen that the boiler gets sorted.
Two. The Saturday job.
He started it in the January of 2014 and he told me — and he looked at me while he said it — that he was bored at weekends.
And I was seventeen and a man told me he had taken a Saturday job because he was bored, and I thought: fair enough.
A fifty-year-old man with two kids every other weekend and a stepson and a full-time job, bored, taking on Saturdays at a builders’ merchant, in the January, for the company.
I did not question it for one second, for two and a half years.
And I did not know any of this.
Not for thirteen years.
I went to college in 2016 on a loan I am still paying, and I have spent my entire adult life believing there had never been much in that account.
Which is exactly what he let me believe.
And the chemistry, which I have mentioned in one line and which deserves more, because it is the whole man in one evening.
I was sixteen and I was failing it and I had decided to drop it.
And he did not know any chemistry. None. He left school at sixteen and he fits kitchens.
So what he actually did, for about five weeks, was sit opposite me and make me read it out loud to him.
That is it. That is the entire method.
He would say “what’s that one mean” and I would have to explain it to a man who could not check whether I was right, and about half the time I would get four sentences in and hear myself and go: oh.
And he never once pretended to follow it. He never nodded along. If I said something and he did not get it he said “no, I’ve lost you,” and I would have to go back.
