And we drove the eleven minutes to Mark’s house in complete silence and she waved at me from the porch and went inside, and I sat in that driveway for probably forty seconds with my hands on the wheel.
That Night I Printed Out Seven Years of Bank Statements and Laid Them on the Kitchen Table
Twenty-two pages. I had to go over to the library branch on Monroe to print them because my printer’s been out of cyan since 2019.
Seven lines. One every January. Forty thousand dollars each.
And I sat there until almost two in the morning with Eleanor’s reading glasses on, which I keep in the drawer and which I have no business wearing, going over those numbers like a man looking for a different answer.
Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
That’s what my father’s store made in a good year in the nineties. That’s a house in this town. That’s four years at a state school twice over.
