Dramatic. Sensitive. Difficult. Always one of those three, in a warm voice, usually at a table.
Austyn got private-school fees.
My parents helped with his rent until he was thirty-one years old. They rescued him every single time he got into difficulty, and he got into difficulty about four times, twice expensively.
Nobody ever used the word dramatic about any of that.
I worked two jobs through college.
And yet whenever something needed paying, or fixing, or collecting from an airport at four in the morning, everybody in that family remembered my number perfectly well.
So I stopped explaining.
I have been explaining to that woman since I was about eleven. I have an extremely good case and I have presented it perhaps forty times and I have never once won.
I hung up. In a corridor, at four minutes past six, standing outside my daughter’s room.
Over the next several days my daughter got better, slowly.
At first she needed a frame.
Her hands shook on the handles and she hated that considerably more than the pain, and she would not let me watch, and on the fourth day she told me to go and get a coffee and I went.
Then every day, a few more steps.
Four on the Tuesday. Eleven on the Wednesday. The length of the corridor and back on the Friday, with the physiotherapist walking beside her and me pretending to read something.
And what hurt most in all of it was not anything she said.
It was what she never asked.
I kept waiting for it. I had an answer prepared, a decent one, warm and vague, and I never once got to use it.
She never asked why her grandmother had not come.
Nine days. Not once.
She never wondered aloud why her grandfather had not rung. She did not mention her uncle at all, and he had taken her to a football match in the February and she had talked about it for a week.
At fourteen, my daughter had already worked out not to expect them.
After we came home, a heavy cream envelope arrived with gold lettering on it.
The Bahamas. Gold lettering. Both our names on the invitation, spelled correctly.
Somebody had sat down with a list and put us on it. Somebody had paid for the printing.
That card cost more than a text message would have.
