The first thing my mother said when I showed her the photograph was, “Your father told you he’d never seen that envelope?”
The second thing she said was, “I wish he’d waited until we could tell you together.”
We were sitting across from each other in a bakery I’d chosen because you had to pay at the counter. I’d already bought my coffee. Mom had bought tea and a slice of lemon cake, then asked for a second fork out of habit.
She set the extra fork beside my cup.
I left it there.
“Tell me what?” I asked.
Mom looked down at the photograph again.
Her back was to the camera. The gifts I’d dropped off were stacked near the coat rack. Brenna’s purse was on a dining chair with tissue paper spilling out, and there, close enough to my mother’s elbow that she could have covered it with one hand, was the envelope with my name on it.
For almost three weeks, I’d kept that photograph in the top drawer of my desk. I’d taken it out twice to look at the pale blue slip beneath the envelope. Both times, I’d decided it could wait.
Then, on Sunday morning, I woke up and realized I wanted an answer more than I wanted another week of guessing.
I’d sent my mother one text.
Could you meet me for coffee? There’s something from Christmas I want to ask you about.
She’d answered within two minutes.
Of course, honey.
I’d stared at the word honey longer than I’d stared at the picture.
Now she picked up her tea, took a sip, and set it down carefully.
“It was a letter from your father,” she said. “And there was money in it.”
I had prepared myself for a bill. I’d prepared myself for a gift card bought at the last minute or a card somebody had forgotten to sign.
“Money for what?”
“For you.”
“How much?”
“Six hundred dollars.”
Somebody behind the counter called out an order. A woman carrying a toddler stood up, gathered three napkins in one hand, and went to get it.
I watched her until she sat back down.
“Where did you get six hundred dollars?” I asked.
“Your father sold his old tools. The ones he kept in the big metal chest. He’d been talking about doing it for months.”
I remembered those tools. When I was small, he used to let me hold the flashlight while he fixed things. I’d get distracted by where the light landed, and he’d move my wrist gently until the beam was back where he needed it.
I remembered the metal chest, too. Its bottom drawer never closed all the way.
“What did the letter say?”
“I remember some of it.”
“I’d like to hear the part you remember.”
Mom ran a finger along the edge of her saucer.
“He wrote that you’d helped us more than we’d ever expected. That he knew there were things you’d put off because we kept asking. He wanted you to get the car looked at. He’d heard it making a noise when you pulled out of the driveway.”
I had been careful to turn the radio up when I drove that car. Apparently, I’d been doing it for my own benefit.
“When was he going to give it to me?”
“He left it on the counter that morning. He asked me to put it with the presents.”
I waited.
Mom cut a small piece off her cake. She drew the fork through the frosting, then set it down again.
“Before you called me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“So he wrote me a letter. He left me money. And then you told me there wasn’t enough money to have Christmas.”
“Yes.”
It was the quickest answer she’d given me all morning.
I looked at her hands. She’d painted her nails a pale pink and missed a thin strip on one thumb. When I was a kid, she used to ask me to paint her right hand because she couldn’t do it neatly with her left. I’d sit beside her at the kitchen table and hold her fingers as still as I could.
I tucked my own hands into my lap.
“Where did the money go?”
She glanced at the photograph.
“Do you remember that electric bill I asked you about in November?”
I remembered standing outside work with my phone pressed to my ear while she read the total. I remembered asking her to text me a picture of the bill, and how quickly she’d told me I could transfer the money to her and she’d pay it on the way home.
“I paid it,” I said.
“You gave me the money for it.”
I heard the difference before she said anything else.
“Where did my money go?”
“Your father was behind on the car payment.”
I set my cup down. I hadn’t realized I was holding it.
“You told me you’d paid the electric bill.”
“I thought I could catch it up before you asked again.”
“Did you?”
“In January.”
I looked at the blue slip in the photograph.
“That was the notice?”
She nodded.
“The amount on it was a little less than six hundred. I took the money out of your envelope after dinner. I put it in my purse and paid the bill the first day the office was open.”
I could follow the arithmetic. For years, I’d been good at following the arithmetic.
The part I couldn’t get past was that there had been a letter. Somebody had noticed the car. Somebody had sold something of his own and thought about what I needed.
I’d spent that evening alone, watching a video on my phone, while an envelope with my name on it sat within reach of everyone having dinner.
“What happened to the letter?” I asked.
Mom pressed her lips together.
“I threw it away.”
I pulled my coffee closer and took a sip even though it had gone lukewarm. I wanted to do one thing in my own time.
“Why?”
“I didn’t want you to read it and ask where the money was.”
She looked at me when she said it.
I had come ready to hear how overwhelmed she’d been. I’d expected to be reminded that the lights might have gone off, or that Dad needed the car, or that anybody would have done the same thing with a past-due bill in front of them. I knew how to sit through that kind of explanation. I’d been doing it since I was old enough to have a checking account.
Hearing her say she’d thrown the letter away because she didn’t want me to ask about the money left me with nothing to argue against.
“Did Dad ask what happened to it?”
“He asked after dinner. I told him you’d stopped by to pick it up while he was out getting ice.”
I thought about my father’s letter in May. The careful way he’d written that he’d heard Mom on the phone. The two hundred dollars folded inside.
“He thought I’d read it?”
“For a while.”
“How long is a while?”
Mom looked out the window. A man in a bakery apron was carrying a stack of empty crates past the glass.
“Until he asked me to help with the list of what we owed you,” she said. “He wanted to subtract the six hundred.”
I sat back.
“He knew when he mailed me the check?”
“Yes.”
“And then he told Brenna he’d never seen the envelope.”
“Yes.”
The bakery was warm enough that I’d taken my coat off when I came in. I put it back on, one sleeve at a time.
Mom watched me.
“I can pay it back,” she said.
“How?”
“I’ve been putting some money aside.”
I looked at her.
“From where?”
She hesitated.
In another conversation, at another time, I would have filled the silence for her. I would have said she didn’t need to explain or told her we could talk about it later. I let her take the time she needed.
“I started doing the books for a woman I used to work with,” she said. “She has a little cleaning business. It’s only a few hours a week.”
I hadn’t known that. For a second I almost asked her how she liked it. I could picture her coming home and telling Dad about her first day, setting her purse on the kitchen chair.
“Okay,” I said. “You can send what you can afford after your bills are paid. I want you and Dad to work out how you’re recording it, so the same six hundred doesn’t show up twice.”
She nodded.
“And if he’s got something he wants me to know, he can tell me himself.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Mom looked down at the cake. The little cut she’d made in it had left a thin white line through the frosting.
“Will I see you again?” she asked.
The question sounded smaller than anything else she’d said that morning.
“I don’t know when.”
She swallowed. Then she picked up the extra fork and set it back on her own saucer so I could reach my cup without moving it.
I slipped the photograph into my bag.
As I stood up, she said my name.
I stopped.
“I remember the last line,” she said. “In your father’s letter.”
I kept my hand on the back of the chair.
“He wrote, ‘I should’ve asked what you needed a long time ago.’”
Outside, I got into the gray car and turned the key. The radio came on to the station Patricia and I had spent fifteen minutes trying to save. A man was reading the weather.
I sat through the whole forecast before I trusted myself to pull out.
I drove to Lauren’s house without calling first.
She opened the door holding half a peeled orange.
“I was going to clean,” she said.
“I can go.”
She looked at my face.
“You can come in. I just want somebody to know I was going to clean.”
There was a pile of laundry on her couch. We each moved a little of it and sat down. She finished peeling the orange and handed me half.
I told her about the envelope. I got through the six hundred dollars, the electric bill, and the tools. When I got to the letter, my voice went thin.
“I’d like to read it,” I said.
Lauren waited.
“I know it’s gone. I still keep thinking I’d like to read it.”
She pulled a thread off the cuff of her jeans.
“What would you want to see first?”
I thought about it.
“Whether he started with my name. Or whether he wrote ‘Dear’ first.”
For most of my adult life, Dad’s notes had been lists on the backs of receipts. Milk. Batteries. Call your mother when you get in. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him write a whole page to me before the half page he mailed with the check.
“What did you say when she told you she threw it away?” Lauren asked.
“I asked why.”
“And then?”
“Then I asked about Dad.”
I looked down at the orange. I’d peeled all the white strings off one segment and laid them in a little heap on my knee.
“I wish I’d told her what it meant to me.”
“You still can.”
I thought about my mother sitting with her tea, hearing my steps go away across the floor.
“I might,” I said.
Lauren went to get us a plate for the orange peels. When she came back, I was reading a text from Brenna.
I bought a plant. The woman at the store said it thrives on neglect. I feel like she understood me.
She’d attached a picture of a little green plant on the windowsill above that awful dining table.
I typed, What did you name it?
Brenna sent back, I can barely keep track of its watering schedule and you want me to give it paperwork?
I smiled.
Then I opened the photo again and noticed a chipped yellow mug beside the pot. It was one of a pair I’d bought Brenna years ago, when she first moved out. One of them had broken. I remembered because she’d called me after dropping it and put me on speaker while she swept up the pieces.
I used to know what she was doing on ordinary Tuesday nights. I had missed that kind of knowing. Sitting on Lauren’s couch, I realized I could tell my sister about the bakery some other day. We could spend that afternoon talking about a plant.
Call it Gary, I wrote.
Absolutely not, she replied.
Twenty minutes later, she sent me a photograph of the pot with GARY written on a strip of masking tape.
I called Dad on Tuesday.
He answered on the second ring and said, “Everything okay with the car?”
“It’s fine.”
“Good.”
I heard a drawer close on his end of the line.
“I spoke to Mom,” I said. “She told me what was in the envelope.”
He went quiet.
“Did you recognize it when Brenna showed you the photo?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tell her you hadn’t seen it?”
“I thought if you and I could get through the list first, I’d bring it up when things were a little better between us.”
I sat down at my kitchen table. The leg I’d tightened in February held steady when I leaned on it.
“You had space in the letter you sent me,” I said.
“I did.”
“You could’ve put it right after the part about the turkey.”
“I could’ve.”
I closed my eyes. In a way, I wanted him to argue. I knew what to do when one of my parents argued. I could come up with examples. I could speak more slowly. I could give the same answer three different ways until the conversation wore both of us out.
Dad stayed quiet.
Finally, I asked him how he found out about the money.
“I was going through the statements,” he said. “I asked your mother which account she’d put the six hundred in before she gave it to you. I thought maybe you’d deposited it and it would be there somewhere in the transfers. She told me what she’d done.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked if she still had the letter. Then I went outside for a while.”
“How long did it take you to decide to tell me?”
He cleared his throat.
“I decided that afternoon. Then I decided the next day. I kept deciding.”
That was the first thing he’d said that made me put my forehead in my hand.
After a moment, he said, “I still have the first page.”
I raised my head.
“What?”
“Of what I wrote. I started on a pad of lined paper from the kitchen drawer. I got most of the way down the page and started over because I’d crossed too much out. The first one was still in the pad.”
“Where is it now?”
“On the counter.”
I could hear him move. I thought he might be reaching for it.
“Can you send it to me?” I asked.
“Sure. I could bring it over.”
“Mail it.”
“All right.”
“And Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“If you crossed something out, leave it crossed out. I want the page you have.”
A long moment passed.
“I can do that,” he said.
The envelope arrived on Friday.
I was halfway up the stairs to my apartment when I noticed I’d stopped walking.
There was my name again, with too much space between the first and the last.
I carried it inside and set it on the table. I put away the milk I’d bought after work. I took off my shoes. I went back for the envelope before I’d even hung up my coat.
Dad had put the folded notebook paper inside by itself. I opened it carefully.
The first line said, Dear.
I cried so quickly that I had to lift the paper away from me to keep a tear from dropping on it.
The next part started twice. The first version was written in the cramped hand Dad used when he didn’t want to waste paper.
Your mother and I are grateful for everything you’ve done.
He’d crossed out Your mother and.
Under that he’d started again.
I’m grateful. I’ve been letting your mother do most of the asking, which made it easy for me to think the asking was something she did and the helping was something you did. I should have had something to do with what happened in between.
I read that sentence three times.
Farther down, he’d written about my car.
I heard it on Sunday. I thought about telling you to take it in. Then I thought about how often I’ve told you something that needed to be done without asking how you were going to do it.
Near the bottom of the page, he’d started a line about the money. The numbers were written clearly. The sentence after them had been crossed out so firmly the paper had worn thin beneath the pen.
I tilted the page toward the window.
I could make out four words.
You can count on me.
I sat there until it got too dark to see the rest.
Then I turned on the kitchen light and read the whole page again.
There was no final line about what I needed. That must have come when he rewrote it. What I had was a man sitting at a kitchen counter, trying to put his own name beside what he’d done. I could see where he’d gotten somewhere and where he’d stopped.
At the bottom, beneath the last line, there was a faint brown circle from a coffee cup.
That mark made me cry harder than the words had.
I remembered Dad writing my permission slips the morning they were due, with his cup balanced on the counter and me hopping from one foot to the other because the bus was coming. He used to put the paper on top of the cereal box so I wouldn’t spill milk on it.
I missed him in a way I hadn’t let myself miss him for a long time.
I still remembered the turkey was already in the oven.
I laid the page flat on the table. After a while, I took a picture of it, then slid it into a folder so it wouldn’t get creased again.
I sent Dad one message.
It came today. I read it.
He wrote back, Thank you for telling me.
I’d gone into the kitchen that evening thinking I might need the whole night to deal with what was in the envelope. By eight, I was hungry. I put a potato in the oven, called Patricia, and asked whether she wanted breakfast on Saturday.
She said she’d already planned on it.
The money from Mom came in small amounts.
Thirty-five dollars the first time. Twenty the next.
On the third transfer, she wrote Christmas envelope in the memo.
I entered the amount in the spreadsheet I’d made after Dad mailed me his list. Then I went back and changed the description on the first two payments so all three matched.
About a week later, she sent me a picture of a pie.
The crust had come apart at the edge. I could see where she’d tried to patch it with an extra piece of dough.
I baked it too long, she wrote.
I almost sent back what I’d said a hundred times when she worried about something she’d made.
I’m sure it’s perfect.
Instead, I wrote, It looks like the kind where the crunchy bit will be the best part.
She sent me a picture of the first slice. The filling had slumped all over the plate.
It tastes better than it looks.
I believe you, I wrote.
We stopped there. She hadn’t asked me to visit. I hadn’t gone through the rest of the evening wondering when she would.
I was putting the phone down when I realized I couldn’t remember the last time Mom and I had talked about a pie for the sole purpose of talking about a pie.
At the end of August, Brenna came over for dinner.
She brought tomatoes from her neighbor’s garden and a packet of basil she’d bought on the way. I’d already made pasta. She sliced the tomatoes while I looked for the bowl I wanted to serve them in.
Halfway through dinner, she pulled a folded piece of paper out of her bag.
I raised my eyebrows.
She laughed.
“It’s a recipe. My roommate finally wrote down how she makes eggs.”
She put it on the table between us. Across the top, in her roommate’s handwriting, it said, Medium-low. I am begging you.
“I made them for myself three days in a row,” Brenna said.
“Did you get sick of them?”
“Yes. But I was very good at making them by the third day.”
We talked about her classes. She’d been taking fewer at a time since she started working Saturdays. She told me she was probably going to graduate a semester later than she’d expected.
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
“It did at first. I kept thinking everybody would ask what happened.”
“And have they?”
“My adviser asked if I could make it to a Thursday class at six. I said yes. That was the whole conversation.”
She twirled a forkful of pasta, lost half of it, and went after the rest with her fork.
I had helped her fill out her first set of school forms. I’d taken a day off work to go with her to orientation. Part of me felt a little ache at the idea of her sitting across from an adviser and deciding what she could manage without calling to ask me.
I wanted to hear all about what she’d picked.
“What are you taking on Thursdays?”
She told me. Then she told me about the instructor, who wore the same cardigan in every photograph Brenna could find of her online. By the time we finished eating, I knew the name of the course and the names of two people Brenna hoped would be in it.
She stood up and carried both plates to the sink.
“Leave those,” I said automatically.
Brenna looked over her shoulder.
“Do you want me to leave them?”
I’d invited her to dinner. She’d offered to do dishes by getting up and doing them. It was a simple exchange. I’d made it complicated before she could turn on the water.
“Actually, would you wash?” I asked. “I’ll dry.”
She handed me a plate a few minutes later and waited for me to take it before reaching for the next one.
When we were finished, she dried her hands and said, “Mom asked if I’d talk to you about Thanksgiving.”
I laid the dish towel over the oven handle.
“Will you?”
“I said she could ask you.”
I looked at her.
“That was the whole conversation?”
“Mostly. She asked why I couldn’t just mention it. I said I could mention she’d asked, and she’d still have to call you.”
Brenna leaned against the counter. Her shirt was wet where she’d pressed it against the edge of the sink.
“I hope you come,” she said.
I waited for the rest.
She glanced down at the wet patch.
“I’d like to have dinner with you,” she added. “I liked having dinner with you tonight.”
That I could answer.
“I liked it too.”
She took the egg recipe home with her. After she left, I found one tomato she’d forgotten on the windowsill and sliced it onto toast for breakfast the next morning.
Mom called about Thanksgiving on a Thursday evening in October.
I knew it was her because I’d finally taken her number off silent. I let it ring once while I found a place to set my tea.
“Are you doing anything for Thanksgiving?” she asked.
“I told Lauren I’d come over.”
There was a pause.
“What time do you go there?”
“Early afternoon, I think.”
“All right.” I heard her set something down. “Your father and I were going to have Brenna over. Patricia said she could come by after four. I wondered if you might want to stop in for dessert.”
I walked over to the window. The parking lot was wet, and the lights from the building were reflected in the roof of my car.
“What would you like me to bring?” I asked.
The question came out so easily I barely heard it until she answered.
“Just yourself. I’ll make the pie early so it has time to set.”
I could feel my mouth getting ready to offer whipped cream, coffee, anything I could buy that would give me a reason to be standing on their porch.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
Mom drew a breath.
“I’d like that,” she said. “If you come.”
We got off the phone a minute later. I picked up my tea. It was still hot enough to drink.
I waited almost a week before I told her I’d come for one hour.
On Thanksgiving, I stayed at Lauren’s until she started sending people home with leftovers.
I’d brought two pies, as requested. One was apple. The other was pumpkin. Lauren cut herself a slice of each before she put either one on the table.
When I got my coat, she walked me to the door.
“What time do you want me to text?” she asked.
We’d talked about it earlier in the week. I’d asked her to check in so I could leave when I’d said I would, even if I lost track of time.
“Six,” I said.
She reached into the pocket of her apron and handed me a slice of apple pie wrapped in foil.
“For later.”
I put it in my bag.
When I pulled up at my parents’ house, the porch light was on. I could see my mother moving through the front window, carrying something flat with both hands.
I sat in the car long enough to see Dad come into the room. He took whatever she was holding and carried it the rest of the way.
Then I went to the door.
Mom opened it before I knocked.
She looked at my face. I watched her eyes move down to my hands.
I’d come with my keys and my bag. That was all.
She opened the door wider.
“I’m glad you came,” she said.
I stepped inside.
Dad was standing by the table. He said hello and put his hands into his pockets. Brenna was in the kitchen arguing with Patricia about whether the kettle had actually boiled.
I took my coat off. Mom reached for it, and I handed it to her.
The dining room looked smaller than I remembered. There was a mark on the wall behind Dad’s chair where the chair had bumped it for years. The tablecloth was the same one from the picture, with the embroidered leaves along the edge.
Mom had put out plates for dessert.
My place was beside Brenna’s.
I sat down there.
For the first twenty minutes, we talked about things that could have come up at any Thanksgiving. Patricia told a story about going to buy a new washing machine and discovering the salesperson was the same man who had told her the old one was old. Dad asked about Brenna’s Thursday class. Brenna told him about the instructor’s cardigan.
Mom cut the pie. The pieces came out whole.
She put a slice in front of me and asked if I wanted coffee.
I said yes.
She brought it in the mug with the faded blue flowers, the one I used to reach for when I lived there.
I set both hands around it.
Across the table, my father looked like he had something to say.
I’d seen that look on him my whole life. Usually, he waited for Mom to notice it and ask.
This time, he spoke.
“Did you ever get the car looked at?”
“I bought another one. It’s the gray one outside.”
“I saw it when you pulled in.”
He picked up his fork.
“Could you show it to me before you go?”
“Sure.”
We went outside a few minutes before six. I showed him the dent, then opened the driver’s door so he could see the inside.
He crouched down and pointed at a lever beneath the seat.
“That changes the height. I’ve got the same kind in mine. Took me two months to find it.”
I got in and tried it. The seat went up so far my head nearly touched the roof.
Dad laughed. I let it drop again.
My phone buzzed in my bag. I knew it was Lauren.
Dad heard it, too. He stepped back so I could get out.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said.
I turned to face him.
“The letter,” he said. “Did you get to the part I crossed out?”
“Some of it.”
“I wrote that you could count on me. Then I took it out because I hadn’t given you much reason to believe it.”
A car went by slowly, its headlights moving across the lawn.
“I could read those words,” I told him.
He nodded.
I could see him looking for the next thing to say. He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the car door.
“Would it be all right if I called you sometime?” he asked.
I thought about Brenna calling me to talk about a dog stealing a chicken. How I’d stood in my kitchen, laughing, and forgotten to turn on the stove.
“You can try Sunday,” I said. “I usually go to the grocery store in the morning, so afternoon’s better.”
“Okay.”
I took my bag off the passenger seat and reached for my keys. Dad glanced toward the house.
“Your coat’s inside.”
We went back to get it.
Mom was in the hall with a small container in her hand. I’d already had dessert. She held it out anyway.
“Take another piece if you want it.”
I thought about the slice Lauren had tucked into my bag. I’d have pie for days.
“I do want it,” I said.
Mom gave me the container. She helped me get one sleeve of my coat straight when the lining caught on my watch. Then she let go.
Brenna called goodbye from the kitchen. Patricia told me to drive carefully.
I walked down the front steps with the container warm against my palm.
In the car, I texted Lauren.
Leaving now. I have more pie.
She replied before I’d started the engine.
This is how I assume wealth works.
I laughed. From where I was sitting, I could still see my old place at the table through the window. My mother picked up my plate and carried it into the kitchen.
I put the container on the passenger seat and drove home.
A week later, I got a plain white envelope in the mail.
I recognized my mother’s handwriting this time.
Inside was a copy of the old electric bill, the one she’d paid with the money Dad had put aside for me. She’d written the date at the top, with a little arrow pointing to the total. Behind it was a second page from the same account.
I almost put both pages down. I’d spent years reading my parents’ bills at my kitchen table. I knew how it felt when a number stopped being a number and became a decision they expected me to make.
Then I saw my name.
It was printed on the second page, beside a label I didn’t recognize at first.
I leaned closer.
AUTHORIZED CONTACT.
Beneath it was my old phone number, the one I’d had before I moved into this apartment.
Mom had written a note on the back.
I went in to get copies of everything. The woman at the desk showed me this. Your name was on the account long before the Christmas bill. She said she needed to speak to you to explain when it was added. I asked her to put that in writing and she gave me her number.
I thought about calling her myself first. I’m sending you what she gave me.
There was a business card clipped to the corner.
I laid the two pages beside each other.
When I’d helped my parents with bills, I’d paid a few directly over the phone. I could imagine giving somebody permission to talk to me about a payment. I could also imagine forgetting the conversation five minutes later because I was back at work, or trying to get dinner on the table, or answering a call about something else.
What I couldn’t explain was the date on that second page.
It was from a year before I had ever paid one of their bills.
I turned the card over. The woman had written a reference number on the back and, below it, a note in small, tidy letters.
Please ask for the original application.
I sat there with the note in front of me until my tea went cold.
Then I got up, reheated it, and opened my calendar. I had a meeting at nine the following morning and another at eleven. I wrote the reference number down beside the half hour between them.
At ten the next morning, I shut my office door and dialed.
The woman who answered asked me to read her the number on the back of the card.
I did.
I heard her type. A few seconds later, she asked me to confirm my old phone number.
Then she said, “I have the application here. Before we go through it, can you tell me where you were living when you signed it?”
I looked down at the date again.
That month, I’d been living three hours away.
“I can tell you where I was living,” I said. “I’d like to see what you’re looking at first.”
There was a pause.
“Of course,” she said. “I can send you a copy.”
I gave her my email address and stayed on the line. When the attachment came through, I opened it and went straight to the bottom of the page.
I knew the signature immediately.
I’d seen it on every school permission slip my father ever wrote.
END OF BONUS PART 2
CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING BONUS PART 3 — My mother cried that they couldn’t afford Christmas dinner, then hosted our entire family without me while I ate leftovers alone., STORY BY DRAMAVERDICT.
