Two: ask for the number.
When somebody you love tells you things are tight, tells you money’s hard, tells you they’re in a spot — ask them what the number is.
Not to judge it. Not to fix it. Just so it exists out loud, in a room, between two people.
My daughter sat on a stool in my store and gave me the opening and I filled it with a story about beans.
The number was two hundred and eleven thousand dollars, and I could have survived hearing it, and she could have survived saying it, and the alternative turned out to be seven years in a rental house in Lakewood.
Three: she asked me if she could live at my house six months before she told me the truth, and I laughed at it.
That’s the one I’d carve into something.
Because everybody who reads this story is going to remember the oak tree. The ice cream. The eight words. The part where a brave little girl finally told her grandfather.
