Chapter 10
Grace was silent.
“I was ashamed,” Arthur said.
“You weren’t the only one.”
I stepped away before they noticed me listening.
That night, I asked Grace why she had turned down Arthur’s money.
She was folding laundry on the couch.
“Because money can make complicated things feel simple,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
She folded one of Annie’s shirts.
“Mr. Whitmore thought helping us financially would fix what happened with Dad.”
“Wouldn’t it have helped?”
“Yes.”
Her answer surprised me.
“It would have helped a lot.”
“Then why say no?”
Grace stopped folding.
“Because I was angry.”
“At Arthur?”
“At everyone.”
She looked toward the bedroom where Annie slept.
“Mom and Dad were gone. I was seventeen. People kept telling me what I should do with you two. Some relatives said we should be split up because keeping us together would be too hard. A social worker said I needed a plan. A lawyer said I needed documents. Then a millionaire I had never met wrote saying he wanted to pay our expenses.”
“And you thought he wanted something.”
“I thought accepting meant admitting we couldn’t manage.”
“But we couldn’t.”
Grace smiled sadly.
“No. We couldn’t. Not really.”
That was the first time I had ever heard her admit it.
“I made choices because I was scared, Caleb. Sometimes scared people call it independence because independence sounds stronger.”
I sat beside her.
“Do you regret saying no?”
She considered the question for a long time.
“Sometimes.”
The next Saturday, Arthur showed me an old photograph.
We were cleaning shelves in the greenhouse when he found a box behind several gardening books.
The photograph showed Arthur standing beside a group of employees in front of a fleet of blue trucks.
He was younger, with dark hair and no cane.
Near the end of the row stood my father.
I recognized him immediately.
Dad looked thinner than I remembered, but his smile was the same.
Arthur sat down.
“He was thirty-one there.”
“How old were you?”
“Forty-eight.”
“You look grumpy.”
“I probably was.”
I turned the picture over.
May you like
Someone had written a date.
And beneath it, in different handwriting:
