And I am not going to, and the reason is not that I am above it.
It is that telling him would be about me. There is no version of that phone call that helps Hollis Brandt. It is just me wanting a man to know he was beaten, thirteen years later, by somebody who did not tell him at the time.
Ollie is twenty-four and he is a plumber and he is better company than any of us.
My mother and Hollis are still married and she is fifty-four and he is fifty-seven, and she told me in the August that the Saturday job was the only thing they ever properly argued about, because she worked out what it was for in about three weeks and he would not discuss it.
And the car.
It went in 2016, when I left. Sold for about nine thousand, which went straight back into the account it had come out of, and which is what I used for my first year’s books and a deposit on a flat in 2019.
So I did get it in the end. It just went the long way round and through a man who is not my father.
And Maisie, because the account I opened in the September is for her daughter and she does not know, and that sits slightly wrong with me.
She was nine on that driveway with a paper plate.
And she is the one out of all of us who got the least, and nobody planned that and nobody noticed it while it was happening.
Ollie got a trade. I got a loan and a degree and a house. And Maisie was eleven when I left for college and sixteen when Hollis’s overtime finally stopped, and by the time it was her turn to be the expensive one there was nothing left in the middle of that family to be spent.
I did not take it off her. There was never a pot with both our names on it.
But there was a Saturday job that ran from 2014 to 2016, and eight thousand nine hundred dollars, and a man who only has so many Saturdays in him.
And she has never said one word about any of it, and I do not think it has ever occurred to her, and I am not going to be the person who puts it in her head.
Which is why the account is quiet, and why I told my mother and nobody else, and why I am aware that I have now invented a reason to keep a secret from somebody for their own good.
Which is the family business, apparently.
And the last thing, which is the keys.
