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.

For about ninety seconds that man gave a tour of a car to an eleven-year-old who did not know what was happening.

And Hollis stood next to me the whole time with a set of keys in his fist and did not say one word.

And then Wade shut the door and the tour was over because there was nobody left to give it to, and that was when he said the thing to my mother about letting him know when I grew up.

It was the only genuinely unbearable part of that afternoon and it lasted a minute and a half and nobody has ever mentioned it since.

And that is the end of the part everybody likes.

I felt about ten feet tall for roughly nine days.

And then that car started costing money.

A brand-new car, insured for a seventeen-year-old, in his own name, in October of 2013.

Four thousand one hundred dollars for the first year.

And I did not know that number at the time. I did not think about insurance once. I was seventeen and somebody had put a car on my driveway and the word insurance did not enter my head for one second.