Chapter 2: The Table
At the dinner table that evening, I stared at a bowl of watery broth, four stale crackers, and a pill bottle containing the very last of my father’s blood pressure medication. The radiator was cold, and my mother was wearing two heavy winter coats indoors.
“Where is the money I’ve been sending you every month?” I asked.
Martha frowned, her eyes filled with genuine confusion. “What money, sweetheart?”
Before I could process her response, the front door opened. Mark walked in carrying a couple of grocery bags, a tight, overly bright smile plastered across his face.
“Ethan! Man, what a surprise!”
He sat at the table, talking loudly about everything and anything while actively dodging every question about bank accounts. Every time I brought up wire transfers, Mark smoothly changed the subject. Throughout the evening, he kept darting anxious glances toward an old wooden cabinet standing in the hallway.
I watched the performance with the same attention I gave to quarterly audits. The grocery bags contained the cheapest store-brand items. The bags themselves were reused. Mark’s coat was newer than anything my parents wore. His phone, when it lit briefly on the table, was a recent model. The contrast was not subtle once I stopped accepting his assurances at face value.
May you like
My father ate slowly, rationing the broth. My mother kept glancing at me with the particular worry of someone who believed she was looking at a son on the edge of financial collapse. The guilt they carried was real. The debt they believed I carried was not. Someone had built that fiction carefully enough that they had turned off the heat and stretched medication to protect me from a crisis that existed only in the letters Mark claimed I had written.
I did not confront him at the table. The cabinet and its contents would still be there after my parents went to sleep. Mark’s glances had already told me where the proof lived.
