We ordered. We talked about the commission he was working on. We talked about an exhibit he’d seen. We did this for about fifteen minutes, which is how long it takes Ethan to eat half a sandwich, and then I said, “I need to talk to you about the wedding money thing.”
He set down his sandwich. “I figured,” he said.
“Before I say anything, I want to know what you were told.”
He seemed surprised by that framing. “What I was told about what?”
“About me. About whether I was helping.”
He said that his mother had mentioned, a few weeks before the Sunday dinner, that Nora was really happy for them and was planning to contribute to help close the budget gap. That it was her way of being part of the celebration.
I asked what he knew about my college.
He said he knew I’d done the community college route and then transferred, which he’d always thought was smart actually, a more practical path. He said he knew I’d gotten grants.
“Did anyone ever tell you about money that was supposed to be set aside for me?”
The thing that happened to his face when I said that was not guilt exactly. It was the face of someone encountering a piece of information and not immediately knowing what to do with it. “No,” he said. “I mean — not specifically.”
I told him about the thirty-six thousand. I told him about the April conversation my senior year. I told him about my mother’s email and my father’s birthday card. I told him about the six years, the work schedule, the statistics class I’d had to drop, the loans that had taken me until twenty-nine to repay.