Not one. Not a tuition statement, not a dentist bill, not a shoe receipt.
I ran a business for thirty-eight years where I counted the drawer twice a day and reconciled an invoice to the penny over a crate of bruised peaches.
And I handed a man forty thousand dollars a year on a handshake because he’d cried on my shoulder at a funeral.
Two: I watched my granddaughter show up in secondhand coats for seven straight years and I invented a reason for it.
That’s the one that should have ended this in year one.
A man is receiving forty thousand dollars a year, all of it earmarked for a child, and the child’s coat has somebody else’s name on the tag in the collar.
Those two facts cannot both be innocent, and I put them side by side in my own head every October, and every October I came up with he’s saving it for her.
