Chapter 3: What the Transfer Was Really For
I took Lauren's phone.
The notification was from our parents' joint account.
The transfer amount was three thousand dollars.
The memo line read: *kitchen repairs.*
I looked up.
"When did they ask you for this?"
"Last Tuesday," Lauren said.
"Mom called.
Said a pipe had burst under the sink and the contractor needed a deposit before the weekend."
I turned to my father.
"Is there a burst pipe, Dad?"
He sat back down.
Slowly.
Like his legs had made the decision before his brain did.
"There were some unexpected costs," he said.
"What costs?"
He picked up his napkin and set it down again.
"The mortgage payment wasn't the only thing that got difficult after the refinance."
"How much more?" Lauren asked.
Her voice had gone very flat.
The kind of flat that comes after the anger runs out and what's left underneath is something much colder.
Mom spoke instead.
"We didn't want to worry anyone."
"You didn't want to worry anyone," I repeated.
"So you took money from both of us.
At the same time.
Without telling either of us about the other."
"It wasn't like that—"
"Then tell me what it was like," Lauren said.
"Because from where I'm standing, you called Jenna eighteen months ago and cried about the mortgage.
She started sending eight thousand dollars a month.
And then last week you called me about a fake pipe and took three thousand more.
And neither of us knew the other was giving you anything."
Dererick was very still at the end of the table.
He was looking at Dad with an expression I had never seen on his face before — not smug, not superior.
Calculating.
Like he was quietly revising something.
"How much debt are you actually in?" he asked.
Dad's jaw tightened.
"That's between me and my family."
"I am your family," Dererick said.
"Apparently the one you forgot to ask."
That landed wrong on everyone.
Including Lauren, who shot him a look he didn't catch because he was still watching my father.
Aunt Patricia picked up her glass, found it empty, and set it back down.
"Robert," she said — my father's name, the one she only used when things were serious — "how bad is it?"
Dad looked at the tablecloth.
The turkey had gone cold.
The potatoes had a skin forming on top.
Tyler was sitting very still in his chair, staring at the centerpiece like if he focused hard enough on the artificial flowers he could disappear entirely into them.
"The refinance wasn't the beginning," Dad said finally.
"It was just when things became impossible to manage alone."
Mom made a small sound.
Not a protest.
More like a door closing.
"When was the beginning?" I asked.
He didn't answer right away.
Lauren walked back to the table and sat down, not in the warm, performed way she'd been sitting all evening, but carefully, like she needed something solid under her.
"Dad." Her voice was quiet now.
"When."
"Three years ago," he said.
"There was an investment.
A friend of mine from the firm — retired now — he had a property opportunity.
I put in a significant amount."
"How significant?" Lauren asked.
"Enough that when it fell through, we had to restructure everything."
The room didn't react loudly.
Nobody gasped.
But I watched Aunt Patricia close her eyes for exactly two seconds, and I watched Dererick place both palms flat on the table, and I watched Lauren look at the ceiling the way people do when they're deciding whether or not to cry.
"And you've been filling the gap since then," I said to my parents.
"By asking us.
One at a time.
For different reasons.
So we wouldn't compare notes."
Mom folded her hands in her lap.
"We were going to pay it back."
"With what?" I asked.
She didn't answer.
I picked up Lauren's phone again, still open to the transfer screen.
Three thousand dollars.
Kitchen repairs.
I thought about the eighteen months of eight-thousand-dollar transfers sitting in my own account history.
I thought about how carefully my mother had cried that afternoon in my kitchen.
How specific the details had been.
The refinance rate.
The payment increase.
The number, almost to the dollar, of what they needed.
She had rehearsed that too.
I set Lauren's phone down in front of her.
"There's something else," I said.
I wasn't sure why I said it.
I didn't have proof.
I just knew my mother, and I knew that the neat story of a failed investment and a struggling mortgage didn't account for the particular care she took when she wanted something from someone.
Mom's chin lifted slightly.
Just slightly.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean I don't think this is everything."
The table was quiet.
Then Dad's phone, sitting face-down near his placemat, lit up with a notification bright enough to glow through the case.
He reached for it fast.
Not fast enough.
Lauren was closer.
She turned it over before he could get there, looked at the screen for three full seconds, and then looked at me.
May you like
"Jenna," she said.
"It's from someone named Carol."
