Adam benefited from the arrangement that had been set up for him long before the house sale. The car, the six months of rent support, the funded gap year at twenty-eight — these were things he received without particular awareness, at the time, that he was receiving something I hadn’t been offered. Not because he was ungrateful or callous but because when you receive something as a matter of course, as the natural response of parents who love you, you don’t necessarily understand it as differential until someone points out that the difference exists.
I had never pointed it out. I’d noticed it, I’d had feelings about it, I’d talked to Leah about it. But I had never said, in an actual conversation with Adam or with my parents: I notice that the help goes one direction. I’d protected myself from the discomfort of that conversation by telling myself I didn’t need anything from them, and by telling myself that needing things would mean something I didn’t want it to mean about me.
What this had done, over the years, was preserve the pattern by never naming it. Adam kept receiving, not because he was greedy but because no one had established that there was a limit. My parents kept giving to Adam, not because they loved him more but because they had developed the unconscious expectation that giving to Adam was something they did, and giving to Natalie was not something that was necessary because Natalie managed.
The house sale was the first time the arrangement had produced a practical consequence I couldn’t manage around. If they’d given Adam fifty thousand and kept a hundred and seventy, nobody would have needed to live anywhere else and nothing would have surfaced. The fact that they gave him a hundred and eighty and kept forty meant they needed somewhere to live, and the somewhere they’d identified without asking was my house.