I sat with that statement folded up on the counter for a long time after she left the room, doing quiet math of my own, trying to figure out exactly how many small sacrifices had added up to those particular numbers.
Everybody at school was getting cars that year. Nothing fancy, mostly, but cars.
I knew we couldn’t swing it. Honestly, it didn’t bother me. You stop wanting things once you know exactly what they cost somebody else.
I remember riding the city bus that whole year, watching classmates pull out of the parking lot in their new cars, and feeling nothing sharper than mild curiosity about where they were all headed in such a hurry.
Then on my seventeenth birthday, my father showed up.
Fourteen years, suddenly.
He’d never remarried. Never had other kids.
I hadn’t seen him in person since my twelfth birthday, a fact that hit me harder standing in the driveway than it ever had over the phone.
