My biological father gave me a car for my 17th birthday, then told my stepdad, “now he knows who his real father is.” — I wanted to humiliate him back, but then I came up with a lesson the whole family would remember.

Eight thousand nine hundred, plus the three thousand four that was in the account, which I had decided to count because it was mine and it went on that car.

Twelve thousand three hundred dollars.

And he looked at the piece of paper and he pushed it back across the table and he said: “No.”

And I said I was going to keep asking.

And he said: “You can keep asking.”

And we did that four times between the May and the August, and on the fourth one he got properly annoyed with me, which I have seen that man do about three times in fourteen years.

He said: “Gus. If I take that, then it was a loan. It wasn’t a loan.”

And then: “It was mine to spend and I spent it. That’s the end of it.”

So I stopped asking.

And then I did the only other thing available, which I stole from him.

Maisie has a daughter.

She is two. Maisie is twenty-two and she did not go to college, and I am not going to write the reasons down because they are hers, and money was one of about four of them.

In the September I opened an account.