Not how Wade intended, and not in front of anybody, and Hollis Brandt has never once given the slightest sign of having noticed it that way. But he wrote a cheque every October for two years because a seventeen-year-old handed him a set of keys and said something that sounded good.
And there is a week in the middle of all this that I have not mentioned, which is the week I did not ring anybody.
Between the Sunday I found the certificates and the Sunday I went to their house, there were seven days.
And what I did in those seven days was work out how to make it not be true.
I went back through the folder twice looking for something that would show Wade had reimbursed him. I checked whether the policy could have been a fleet thing through Hollis’s work. I looked up whether a stepparent has to be named as payer on a minor’s policy for some technical reason, which is not a thing, and which I spent about forty minutes on.
I was thirty years old at a kitchen table trying to find a version of the facts where nobody had given up anything for me.
Because the alternative was that the best thing I ever did — the driveway, the keys, the sentence — had cost the man it was supposed to honour eight thousand nine hundred dollars and two and a half years of Saturdays.
And it took me a week to stop looking for a way out of that, and I have not entirely stopped.
What I did about it.
I tried to give him the money, obviously.
In the May, at his kitchen table, with a figure written down because I could not say it out loud.
Eight thousand nine hundred, plus the three thousand four that was in the account, which I had decided to count because it was mine and it went on that car.
Twelve thousand three hundred dollars.
And he looked at the piece of paper and he pushed it back across the table and he said: “No.”
And I said I was going to keep asking.
And he said: “You can keep asking.”
And we did that four times between the May and the August, and on the fourth one he got properly annoyed with me, which I have seen that man do about three times in fourteen years.
He said: “Gus. If I take that, then it was a loan. It wasn’t a loan.”
And then: “It was mine to spend and I spent it. That’s the end of it.”
So I stopped asking.
And then I did the only other thing available, which I stole from him.
Maisie has a daughter.
She is two. Maisie is twenty-two and she did not go to college, and I am not going to write the reasons down because they are hers, and money was one of about four of them.
In the September I opened an account.
I put in whatever is left at the end of the month. Some months that is four hundred dollars. In November it was sixty.
And I have not told Maisie and I have not told Hollis and I am not going to.
My mother knows, because I needed somebody to know in case anything happens to me.
Which is, as far as I can tell, exactly how this works.
