Chapter 5 - What He Threw on the Table
"You want to talk money?" Travis's voice had dropped the friendly act completely. "Fine. Let's talk money."
He yanked out the chair across from me and dropped into it hard, like a man who'd just made up his mind about something.
"Megan." He looked at her. "You want to tell your mother, or do you want me to?"
Megan's face locked up.
"Travis. Don't."
"Tell me what?" I said.
"Don't." Megan's voice went low and hard. "This is not the same thing and you know it."
"It's exactly the same thing." He turned back to me. "You want to stand here waving paperwork about who paid for what? Let's talk about the twenty-three thousand dollars your daughter borrowed from my parents two years ago. Before the baby. Before any of this."
The room tilted.
I looked at Megan. She wouldn't look back.
"Megan."
"It was a loan," she said quietly. "We were always going to pay it back."
"We haven't paid back a dime," Travis said. "Not one dime in two years. And my mother brings it up every single time I talk to her, and I have to sit there and tell her we're working on it."
He leaned forward, elbows on the table.
"So yeah, Eleanor. I wrote you a bill. Maybe I shouldn't have done it like that. But don't march in here with a folder and act like you're the only person in this family keeping a ledger. You're not."
I let that sit for a second.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I said to Megan.
She finally lifted her head. Her eyes were wet.
"Because I was ashamed. Travis's hours got cut, we had a gap we couldn't cover, and his parents offered. I thought we'd have it paid back before anybody found out."
"My mother's known for two years," Travis said.
"Travis, stop." Megan's voice cracked in half. "Just stop talking."
"No." He stood up. "I'm done being the only bad guy in this room. I handled the bill wrong. I'll say that out loud. But I am not the only person here who's made a mess, and I'm not going to sit at my own table while your mother looks at me like I belong in a courtroom."
He walked out. A door down the hall shut — not a slam, but hard enough.
The baby jolted awake and started to cry.
Megan stood and rocked him, her back to me, her face turned toward the window.
"Megan," I said softly.
"I'm sorry, Mom." She didn't turn around. "I'm sorry you had to find out like this."
"How much of it is true?"
She turned. Her son was tucked under her chin, still whimpering.
"All of it," she said. "Every word of it is true."
I got up from the table. I left the documents where they lay. I crossed the kitchen and put my hand flat on my daughter's back, and she leaned into me the way she used to at nine years old when something had gone wrong at school and she'd held it together all day just to fall apart at home.
"Why didn't you come to me?" I said.
"Because you'd already done so much." Her voice broke on so. "You paid off the house. You drove four hours every time we so much as sneezed. I couldn't ask you for one more thing."
"You could have."
"I know that now."
We stood there, the baby going quiet between us. Down the hall I could hear Travis. Not the words — just the low rise and fall of his voice.
He was on the phone with someone.
I didn't know who.
May you like
But the way Megan's eyes cut toward the hallway told me she already had a guess. And from her face, it wasn't one she liked.
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