One night around eleven, I said I was done and I was quitting the problem set.
“Read it to me one more time,” he said. “We’re not stopping yet.”
We didn’t stop that night, not until close to midnight, when I finally got the whole page of problems right, every single one, and he made us both a late bowl of cereal to celebrate like we’d won something real.
“You know I never actually finished this class myself,” he admitted that night, milk still on his spoon. “Dropped out senior year, went straight to work instead. Family needed the money more than I needed the diploma right then.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that at the start? Would’ve saved us both some embarrassment.”
“Would’ve given you an excuse to quit,” he said. “You needed someone who wasn’t going anywhere, not someone with all the answers.”
That fall he and Mom opened a savings account for college in my name. They started dropping in whatever was left over at the end of the month.
Some months that was nothing. He was still paying child support for Jonah and Lily at the time.
He never mentioned the account to me once. Mom did.
She told me about it almost by accident, a bank statement left out on the counter one afternoon, my name printed at the top of a modest little balance that had clearly been building for years without a single conversation about it.
“He didn’t want you feeling pressure,” she explained, when I asked why nobody had said anything. “He said money that comes with strings attached stops feeling like a gift and starts feeling like a debt. He wanted you to have this without owing anybody an explanation for it.”
