Every check said the same four words. For all four tickets.
Nine Junes. Grandma Winifred had paid for the whole family, every year, including me. Four seats to Orlando. Four to the cruise. Four to Yellowstone, which was why there had been three yellow shirts instead of four, because somebody had made a choice and it was never money. My father cashed each check and bought three tickets and one one-way fare to Wyoming, and the difference went somewhere I never found out and no longer needed to.
The last page was a letter. Grandma Winifred had written to him after the Yellowstone photograph, asking plainly why her granddaughter was not in it. He never answered her. She kept sending the checks anyway, because stopping would have meant the trips stopped, and she had decided that one of her grandchildren getting a summer was better than none.
I drove to her house that morning before sunrise. She was already awake, seventy-five years old, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. She had been waiting for eight years for someone to ask her. When I put the folder down, she cried in a way I had never seen an adult cry.
The envelope I left on the mattress held one thing. The Yellowstone photograph, and on the back, in my handwriting: I counted the shirts.
I lived with Aunt Odette that fall and started college in Laramie in January. Grandma Winifred paid, and this time she wrote the check directly to the school.
My mother called eleven times in the first month. Her message was always the same shape: that I was being dramatic, that I had always preferred being alone. Rowan found me in his second year of college. He had known about the checks since he was sixteen and had been carrying it badly. We talk every week now. He is twenty-eight and still buys me terrible keychains.
I have not spoken to my parents in nine years.
I spent my whole childhood making myself smaller in the hope that someone would finally make room. Nobody ever does. What I understand now is that I was never the one being left behind. I was being erased, and there were two women in that family who saw me the entire time and never once laughed.
