Eventually, I reached beneath the mixing desk and pulled open the drawer.
I opened one.
Inside was a wooden box filled with neatly arranged envelopes.
Each bore a month and year.
I opened one.
Two hundred-dollar bills and a fifty.
Another envelope contained the same amount.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
There were sixty altogether.
Every $250 payment I’d made over the past five years.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
On top lay a note in Dad’s handwriting.
I held the paper against my chest.
“You earned every dollar of this. Don’t waste it the way I wasted my chance.”
I held the paper against my chest.
For five years, I’d thought Dad was taking away my future, twenty-five hundred cents at a time.
And all along, he’d been trying, in his own stubborn, terribly misguided way, to give it back to me.
I looked toward the dark computer screen.
