Not his name. Mine.
I opened it with shaking hands.
The first deposit was dated the first of the month after my eighteenth birthday.
Two hundred fifty dollars.
The next line, the first of the following month. Two hundred fifty dollars.
And the next. And the next. Line after line after line, every single month for five years.
Every dollar of rent I had ever paid him — furious, resentful, counting the days — he had deposited into a savings account in my name.
He had never spent one cent of it.
And he hadn’t stopped there.
Scattered between my rent deposits were others. Larger ones. A few hundred here, a thousand there, whenever he’d had it.
Overtime, I realized. The extra shifts. The vacations he never took.
Five years of my rent, plus everything my father could quietly add to it, had grown into a number at the bottom of that page large enough to make my breath catch.
