“There is exactly twelve thousand dollars left in this account,” I said, my voice shaking so badly the paper rustled in my grip. “Where did the rest of it go, Aunt Karen? Where is the seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars?”
She did not even look up from her crossword puzzle book. She just sat there in her worn yellow recliner, slowly clicking her cheap blue ballpoint pen against the wooden armrest.
“I spent it,” she said, her voice completely flat and unbothered. “On you.”
“On me?” I let out a dry, empty laugh that felt more like a sob. “I wore shoes with holes in them, Karen. I wore Goodwill clothes until I was eighteen. We ate rice and beans five nights a week. Where is the money?”
She clicked the pen one last time, a sharp plastic sound that seemed to fill the tiny room, and set it down on the side table. She finally looked at me.
“I did not spend it on you,” she said, her face completely calm. “I spent it on your brother.”
I stood there staring at her. My brain genuinely stopped working for a second.
“I don’t have a brother,” I whispered.
“Yes you do,” she said, picking the blue pen back up and looking down at her puzzle. “He lives with your father’s other family. The one in Chicago. He needed it.”
I need to back up for a second because none of this makes sense without knowing how we lived. My parents died in a car accident on a rainy Tuesday in October when I was only four years old.
I do not really remember them. I just remember selective, random things. The faint smell of my mom’s lavender perfume, and the sound of my dad’s deep laugh when he swung me around in the yard.
After the accident, Aunt Karen took me in. She was my mother’s older sister, a quiet, hard woman who never married and never had any other children living with her.
We lived in a tiny, drafty two-bedroom house on North Maple Street in Decatur, Illinois. The place always smelled like damp wood, old carpet, and cheap cooking oil.
Karen worked two jobs to keep us afloat, or at least that is what she always told me. She was a cashier at the Walmart on Route 36, making thirteen dollars an hour.
Part 1 of 5
