Enough for a down payment on a house.
I stared at that final figure until the numbers blurred.
Every resentful dollar I’d slapped down on the kitchen table on the first of the month.
He hadn’t taken a single one.
He had caught them, all of them, and held them for me in the dark where I couldn’t see.
Underneath the bank book was a shoebox.
Inside it, wrapped in tissue paper that had gone soft with age, was a pair of leather boots.
Good ones. Waterproof. My size — my size at eighteen, bought years ago and never given.
There was a receipt tucked into one of them, dated the week after I’d asked him for new shoes and been told to put on another pair of socks.
He had gone out and bought them that very week.
And then, for some reason I did not yet understand, he had never been able to hand them to me.
