Security did not turn them away. I went down myself, which surprised my assistant and surprises me still.
They were smaller than I remembered. My father had been a large man in my head for six years and he was not. My mother had a folder with her, and I understood immediately that she had prepared for this the way you prepare for a bank appointment.
Rowena was not with them. She was in a treatment facility in Cranford and had been for eleven weeks. That was the real reason for the tears at twenty to seven, and the real reason for the drive. The article did not mention my company’s valuation. It mentioned that I existed, in a state four hours away, with a phone number they could finally reach.
My mother’s folder held the intake paperwork. Forty-one thousand dollars for the remaining program. They had remortgaged the yellow-bedroom house in the spring and it was not enough.
I paid it. In the lobby, on my phone, while they were still explaining. Then I told them I would not be seeing them again, and my father said he understood, and my mother started to say something about family and stopped herself, which was the closest thing to growth I have ever witnessed in her.
Thandiwe thinks I should not have paid. She has told me so at least a dozen times over the years, and her argument is good: that I rewarded six years of silence, that the money bought me nothing, that I was twenty-three and outside at midnight and they did not call once.
She is right about all of it. I paid anyway. Not for them. Rowena was nineteen when she cried over a refund check, and she has been the family’s emergency ever since, and someone had to stop treating her like one.
She got out in March. She wrote to me last year, three pages, no request in it. She is four years sober now and works at a garden center and has never once asked me for money.
My parents have not contacted me since the lobby. I do not think about them often, and when I do it is usually the hundred and fifty dollars, and how carefully my father folded it, as though the folding were the part that made it enough.
