I stared at it the way you stare at a spider in the bathtub. “Where did all of this come from?”
“We earned it,” Noah said.
“Doing what?”
Ethan counted on his fingers. “Washing cars. Mowing lawns. Tutoring some sixth graders in math. Noah did a dog-walking thing for a while, but the Pomeranian bit him.”
Under any other circumstances I would have laughed. Instead I turned to Kevin. “Did you know about this?”
He shook his head. “Not until last week. I swear to you, Megan.”
The room tilted a little. I sat down on the arm of the sofa. “How much is there?”
Ethan’s voice cracked. “Three thousand eight hundred dollars.”
I want you to understand what that number did to me. When I was raising these boys alone, there were entire winters when I never managed to put away that much in a year. Three thousand eight hundred dollars meant a used car down payment. It meant a month of rent in our old apartment, twice over.
