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.

Wade never paid it.

He was never going to. It never came up. There was no argument about it and no broken promise, because nobody ever asked him, because everybody in that house knew there was no point.

[Hollis paid it.]

Four thousand one hundred dollars in the first year and three thousand eight hundred in the second.

Eight thousand nine hundred dollars.

And he took it out of the college account.

All of it — the three thousand four hundred that was in there by that October, which was fourteen months of whatever was left at the end of the month — and then everything on top of it.

And he took a Saturday job at a builders’ merchant in the January of 2014 and kept it until I left, and he told my mother it was because he was bored at weekends.

And there were two things about that car in those two years that I did notice and did not think about, and I want them in, because I was not blind. I was seventeen, which is different.

One. I never got a bill for anything.

Not the insurance, not the tax, not the service in the March of 2015 that cost four hundred and eleven dollars.