Chapter 1: The Seventh Chair
The form was on my plate when I sat down.
Not next to it. On it. A single printed page, squared neatly in the middle of Mom’s good Thanksgiving china, with a yellow sticky arrow pointing to a blank line at the bottom.
SIGN HERE.
“Megan,” Dad said. “Sit. Eat first. We’ll talk after.”
I didn’t sit. I counted the chairs instead.
Sunday dinner at my parents’ house is usually four people. Tonight there were seven chairs. Mom and Dad at the ends. Grandma June, who hadn’t driven at night in three years, by the window. Aunt Patty and Uncle Ron along the wall. One chair empty, Tyler’s, with his old Little League cap hung on the back like a memorial.
And mine. In front of the form.
“What is this?” I said.
“It’s an emergency,” Mom said. Her eyes were swollen. She had on the gold cross she wears to funerals and court dates.
I’d known about the crash since Tuesday. Everyone had. My brother Tyler, twenty-four, had blown a .14 on Route 9 at one in the morning and put his Charger into the side of a minivan at a red light. The driver, a fifty-one-year-old man named Hector Alvarez, was at County General with a broken pelvis. Tyler had a cut on his chin. Because it was his second DUI and he’d tried to run from the scene on foot, the judge set his bail at six hundred thousand dollars.
A bail bondsman will post that for you if you pay him ten percent. Nonrefundable.
Sixty thousand dollars.
I didn’t have to read the form. I already knew the number.
“We talked to the bondsman,” Dad said. He folded his hands on the tablecloth like he was about to say grace. “Steve Kowalski. Good guy. He takes electronic transfers. All you have to do is sign the authorization, and Tyler’s home tomorrow night.”
“No.”
Nobody moved. Uncle Ron reached for the rolls, and Aunt Patty slapped his hand.
“Megan,” Mom said softly. “He’s in there with criminals.”
“He is a criminal, Mom. He hit a man.”
“It was an accident!”
“He was drunk. That’s not what accident means.”
Dad’s jaw went tight. “Your brother is sick. The gambling, the drinking, it’s a disease, and he needs his family, and you’re sitting on a pile of money doing nothing with it.”
“It’s not doing nothing. It’s my house.”
I’d been saving for seven years. Since I was twenty-two. Every bonus, every tax refund, every lunch I packed instead of bought. Sixty thousand and change in a high-yield savings account, for the little brick house on Birchwood Lane I’d gone under contract on three weeks earlier. Closing was on the eighteenth. Eight days away.
“Houses come and go,” Dad said. “Family comes first.”
“Then you post the bond.”
“We don’t have it. You know we don’t.” His voice cracked on the last word, and for a second I almost felt it. Almost. “We refinanced in March to cover his last debt.”
“His last debt,” I said. “The one I paid four thousand dollars on two years ago? The one he swore was the last one?”
Grandma June was looking at her plate. Aunt Patty wasn’t.
“You’re single,” Patty said. “No kids. What does a single girl even need a three-bedroom house for?”
“Patty,” Grandma said quietly.
“I’m just saying what everybody’s thinking.”
I picked the form up off my plate, folded it once, and set it beside Dad’s hand.
“I’m sorry about Tyler,” I said. “I’m sorrier about Mr. Alvarez. But I’m not paying sixty thousand dollars I’ll never see again so my brother can come home and do this a third time. I’m leaving.”
I took my keys out of my purse.
Mom made a small sound. Not a sob. Something closer to a laugh.
“Honey,” she said. “Sit down. It’s already done.”
I turned around.
She was holding up a photocopy. I knew it before I could read it: the blue-green pattern, my bank’s logo, the word VOID across the middle in my own handwriting. The check I’d given her two years ago to set up a payment plan for Tyler’s debt.
“We gave them your account this afternoon,” she said.
