My parents had itemized, across four pages and what appeared to be several weeks of careful record-keeping, every financial contribution they claimed to have made to my life from the age of eighteen through twenty-six. Tuition assistance, listed by semester. A car they had helped purchase when I was twenty-two, long since sold. Groceries during the summer I had moved back briefly after a job fell through. A security deposit on my first apartment in Portland, which I had repaid in cash within fourteen months and for which I had a bank record they apparently did not know existed.
At the bottom of the final page, in bold, a total.
Eighty-seven thousand, four hundred dollars.
And below that, in language that had the shape of legal language without quite being it, a statement of expectation that given my recent financial success, the family considered it appropriate for these investments to be honored.
Investments. The word sat in the middle of that sentence doing a great deal of work.
I set the document down on the polished dining room table and looked at it for a moment. Then I looked at my father, who was watching me with the expression he used when he believed he held the stronger position. Then at my mother, who had arranged her face into the configuration she used when she wanted to appear both wounded and reasonable simultaneously, a specific expression that had taken me thirty-four years to correctly identify as performance rather than feeling. Then at my brother Logan, who was leaning back in his chair with the particular ease of someone who has not been asked to contribute anything to the occasion except his presence.
No one asked how I was.
No one said they missed me.
