The Check at the Graduation Party

Greg put money in it exactly once. Abby turned three, and at her birthday party at my mother’s house he handed me a card with a fifty dollar bill in it and said, “For the college thing.” I deposited it the next Monday.

That was fifteen years ago. I never asked him for another dime toward it, and he never offered, and I never held it against him.

Some people save. Some people don’t. Greg paid what the court told him to pay, and he showed up to the band concerts.

By March of Abby’s senior year, the account had a little over twenty-two thousand dollars in it. Eighteen years of my Fridays.

It wasn’t a fortune, but at Bowling Green, half an hour up the interstate, it was going to make the difference between Abby working twenty hours a week and Abby working ten.

“Kristen,” I said, “Greg put fifty dollars in that account when Abby was three.”

“So you admit he contributed.”

I closed my eyes. I could hear Abby upstairs, her music low, the floor creaking as she walked from her desk to her bed and back.

She was supposed to be doing calculus. She was probably texting her best friend about prom.

“I’m not going to talk about this tonight,” I said. “Abby’s home.”

“That’s what you said last time,” Kristen said, and she was right. It was the third call.

The first one had come in January, right after Abby got her acceptance letter. Kristen had congratulated her on the phone, sweet as anything, and then asked me in the same breath whether I’d thought about “how the fund would work now that the family is bigger.”

I’d laughed, because I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.

The second call came in February. That one was longer. Kristen talked about how expensive everything was, how Tyler wanted to be a welder or maybe an electrician, how trade school wasn’t cheap either, how it didn’t seem right that one kid in the family had a nest egg and the other one had nothing.

“Tyler’s not my son,” I said that night, as gently as I could. “I like him. I do. But that money is for Abby.”

Kristen hung up on me. Ten minutes later, Abby came down to the kitchen in her socks and asked me, very carefully, if Dad was mad at her.

That was the part I couldn’t stand. Not Kristen. Not the money.

The look on my daughter’s face, eighteen years old and suddenly six again, standing in the kitchen doorway wondering if she had done something wrong by getting into college.

People ask me now why I didn’t just hang up and be done with it, or call a lawyer, or tell Greg to get his wife in line. I can answer every one of those in a sentence.

There was nothing to sue over. The account was mine, in my name, and nobody could touch it. A lawyer would have cost me money to tell me something I already knew.