“Your inheritance.”
“Yes.”
There was something almost shocking about hearing him admit it plainly.
“We shouldn’t have,” he continued. “But we did.”
Ryan stepped beside him.
“When you spent that money on tuition, we acted like you were taking something away from us.”
“Something that wasn’t yours.”
“I know.”
I placed the folder on the counter.
“So you punished me for it.”
David’s eyes were wet.
“At first, we thought you would stop.”
I frowned.
“You thought I’d fail.”
“No. We thought you’d try it for a semester and realize it wasn’t for you.”
“And when I didn’t?”
David looked away.
“We became embarrassed.”
“For me?”
He shook his head.
“For ourselves.”
Ryan gave a small, miserable laugh.
“Every semester you completed made everything we’d said look worse.”
“So instead of admitting you were wrong, you stayed away?”
“Yes.”
A car pulled up outside.
Then another.
I glanced through the kitchen window.
“Who is that?”
My sons exchanged a look.
Ryan gave me a nervous smile.
“Probably your classmates.”
I turned sharply.
“My what?”
“And a couple of professors,” David added.
I stared at them as if they had started speaking another language.
“How do you know my classmates?”
Ryan reached into one of the boxes.
He pulled out several photographs.
The first showed me sitting in the university library with books stacked around me.
The second showed me outside a lecture hall.
In another, I was laughing with three classmates after an exam.
I touched the edge of the photograph.
“Where did you get these?”
“We contacted people from your program,” Ryan said.
“When?”
“A few weeks ago.”
David gestured toward the house.
“The tables are for food. The chairs are for guests. The boxes have decorations.”
My anger slowly gave way to disbelief.
“You planned a graduation party?”
They both nodded.
I wanted to feel happy.
Part of me did.
But another part remembered four birthdays.
Four Christmases.
Years of silence.
“You could have called me.”
David’s face fell.
“We should have.”
“You could have come by once.”
“I know.”
“One birthday.”
“I know.”
“One Christmas.”
“I know.”
My voice cracked.
“One ordinary Tuesday, David.”
His composure broke.
“I know.”
The anger I had been carrying for years suddenly felt heavier than ever.
“Do either of you understand what those years were like?”
Neither answered.
“I walked into classrooms where some people laughed at me. I spent nights wondering whether I had made a fool of myself. I nearly failed exams. I sat at that kitchen table at one in the morning asking whether I had become some ridiculous old man pretending he still had time.”
