What I did not know — what nobody had thought to tell me — was that my parents had decided to fund Adam’s business with the proceeds from the sale of their house.
I found this out not at the Sunday dinner where they announced they were moving in with me, but three days later, when I called Adam to ask if he knew what was going on.
“Oh,” he said. There was a pause. “Yeah. They told me a few weeks ago.”
A few weeks ago.
“How much?” I asked.
Another pause. “A hundred and eighty thousand.”
I did the math in my head. The house had been worth somewhere around three hundred thousand dollars, give or take depending on the market. Mortgage payoff, closing costs, agent fees — that would eat around ninety thousand. Which would leave about a hundred and thirty thousand. Except Adam had said a hundred and eighty thousand.
“Where did they get a hundred and eighty?” I asked.
“They had some savings,” he said. “They put together the whole amount from the proceeds and what they had set aside.”
So the house sale net, plus whatever savings they’d pulled from reserves, had been pooled and handed to my brother. And my parents were closing in six weeks, had already committed the money, and had apparently planned all of this without mentioning any of it to me until the moment they needed a place to live.
## The Phone Call With Leah
I called my friend Leah the next morning, before work, while I was standing in my kitchen drinking coffee and looking at the room that my parents apparently planned to occupy.