No one mentioned the wedding.
“Where did you get this number?” I asked.
My father opened his mouth, and I held up my hand.
“I’m asking specifically,” I said. “Not generally. I’d like to know how you arrived at eighty-seven thousand four hundred dollars.”
“We kept records,” my mother said. “We’ve always kept records.”
“The security deposit on the Portland apartment,” I said. “Fourteen hundred dollars. I repaid it in November of 2015. Bank transfer. I have the record.”
A brief pause.
“There may be some items that need to be reviewed,” my father said.
“There are more than some,” I said. “The car. You contributed two thousand dollars toward a car that cost eleven thousand. I paid the remaining nine thousand from my own savings and the subsequent four years of payments from my own income. Your contribution was two thousand dollars, which I was grateful for at the time, and which is not the same as a loan, and which you did not characterize as a loan when you made it.”
“We considered it understood,” my mother said.
