“He sent you a bill,” she said, when I told her.
“He sent me a bill.”
“For living there.”
“For living there.”
She was quiet for a moment. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to count,” I said. “Every dollar I put into that house and that situation. Every record I have. I need to know exactly what I’m looking at before I say anything else.”
“Do you want help?”
I said yes. It was the right answer and it was harder to say than it should have been.
What made it hard was a version of the question Daniel had asked: had I chosen this? Yes. Absolutely. Nobody had forced me to move in, to turn down the job, to cover the roof. I had made those choices, with as much information as I had at the time.
But the thing about choices made inside a family, inside a particular family narrative, is that they don’t happen in a vacuum. The narrative of our family said that I was available and Daniel was far away and Mom needed someone. The narrative said that Claire handles things. It had said that for as long as I could remember. I had helped build that narrative, and I had lived inside it for so long that defending myself against it felt, somehow, like a betrayal.
That feeling was wrong. But feelings don’t become false just because you’ve identified them.
LEARNING TO COUNT WHAT HAPPENED
Maya came on a Saturday morning with her laptop and a box of pastries, and we sat at my mother’s kitchen table and started going through the folder.