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.
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.
Beneath the boots was a photograph of my mother, young and laughing, that I had never seen before.
And beneath that, an envelope with my name on it in my father's blocky handwriting.
Frank put his hand on my shoulder.
"He wrote that the winter before he passed," Frank said softly. "Took him three tries. I know, because he made me read every draft."
Chapter 3: The Letter
I want to give you my father's letter the way I read it that night, because for the first time in my life, it was him actually talking to me.
"Son.
If you're reading this, then I'm gone, and Frank finally gets to stop keeping my secret.
