My father took notes.
Then I heard his voice, low and uncertain.
“Do you really think Myra will be okay with this?”
My mother laughed.
Not loudly. Not cruelly. Just dismissively, like he had asked whether the sun would rise in the morning.
“Gerald, please. Once everything is here, she will not make a scene. She will just accept it. You know how she is.”
I froze with the phone in my hand.
She will just accept it.
You know how she is.
I replayed that sentence three times, not because I did not understand it, but because I finally did.
That was the story of my life in one sentence.
Growing up as the oldest child in the Seward family meant figuring things out yourself.
When I was sixteen, my younger brother Kyle got a brand-new Ford Mustang for his birthday. Cherry red, leather seats, the whole thing. My parents threw him a party with thirty kids from his class, a cake shaped like a steering wheel, and my mother telling everyone how proud she was of her boy.
