Then he shut the door.
Not rudely. Just… finished.
I told myself he was one of those old-school guys who deposited everything at once, twice a year, at a teller window with a paper slip. My grandfather had been like that.
But December came, and the check didn’t clear.
January came, then February, and none of those checks cleared either.
Every month, I wrote another check.
Every month, the money stayed in my account.
At first, I kept expecting several thousand dollars to vanish overnight. I stopped touching the balance. I treated it as if it already belonged to him.
I asked him about it twice more.
Each time, his answer was the same.
“It’s handled.”
The years passed.
Trixie turned five, then six, then seven. She grew taller. She learned to read.
She stopped asking whether her father would visit and started asking if she could paint her bedroom yellow.
I earned more hours at the dental office.
I left the bakery.
I paid off one credit card.
