Instead, after the funeral, I stood in the entryway staring at his scuffed work boots by the door, and I could not make myself put them away.
That evening, his best friend, Frank, knocked on the door.
He was holding a cardboard box sealed with packing tape.
“Your dad left this with me,” Frank said. He set it on the kitchen table. “He asked me to give it to you only after he was gone.”
I let out a bitter laugh.
“What, did he save every dollar of rent I ever paid him, just to hand it back as a joke?”
Frank didn’t smile.
“I wouldn’t make any guesses,” he said quietly, “until you see what’s inside.”
My fingers fumbled with the tape.
I lifted the flaps.
At first I thought Frank had brought the wrong box.
Then I looked closer, and I sank down into my father’s chair, sobbing so hard that Frank had to hold me upright.
Chapter 2: What Was in the Box
On top was a bank book.
A savings passbook, the old paper kind, with my name printed on it.
Not his name. Mine.
I opened it with shaking hands.
The first deposit was dated the first of the month after my eighteenth birthday.
Two hundred fifty dollars.
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.
