"I spent your college jar on Kaylee's braces. Deal with it!"
That's what my stepmom Crystal yelled at me Saturday when I got home from my shift at the snow-cone stand. Then she grabbed the white laundry basket I'd packed for my dorm, and hurled it onto empty tile. Rolled towels bounced out.
The jar was on the breakfast bar. A big glass jar with one yellow sunflower my mom painted on it before she died, when I was ten. She put the first twenty dollars in it herself. For three summers I filled it, snow cones in the Mesa heat, Sundays bagging groceries. Four thousand six hundred dollars. My ASU deposit, books and part of my first semester.
My dad married Crystal two years ago. I never asked her for a single thing.
Now the jar was empty. Not one coin left.
Crystal stood there with her arms crossed like she'd done me a favor. But something didn't fit. I've lived with her daughter Kaylee for two years. I brush that kid's hair before school every morning. I've seen every tooth she has.
So I didn't scream. I set the empty jar upright and looked toward the hallway.
"Braces? Kaylee, come show me your new braces."
Crystal's face changed. Kaylee stayed behind the hallway threshold hugging her grey stuffed bunny, lips pressed together, and looked up at her mom.
"Mommy, do I still have to say I got braces?"
Nobody moved. Crystal started to say something about kids making things up. Kaylee, who is eight and has never told a lie well in her life, began to cry. I knelt down and told her she was not in trouble. She whispered in my ear, "Mommy said the boxes are a secret until she gets rich."
The boxes were in the garage. Thirty-one of them, shrink-wrapped, stacked behind my dad's motorcycle. Leggings. Hundreds of pairs of leggings from an online boutique company that Crystal's sister had recruited her into. A "founder's starter inventory," four thousand six hundred dollars exactly. Crystal had tried this before, with candles, and my dad had told her never again. So she took my jar. She promised herself she would sell everything in a month and quietly refill it. And she taught her daughter to say "braces" if anyone asked where the money went.
My dad, Rick, came home from the tire shop at six. I did not yell. I handed him the empty sunflower jar and walked him to the garage. He sat down on the boxes and did not say anything for a long time. Crystal cried and said she had done it for the family. My dad said, very quietly, "That jar was the last thing Amy ever gave her daughter."
That motorcycle was a 1978 Harley he had been restoring for six years. He and my mom rode it on their first date. On Monday a man from Gilbert came with a trailer and paid five thousand dollars cash. That night my dad put four thousand six hundred dollars back into the sunflower jar, bill by bill, while I watched. The next morning he opened a real savings account in my name only, with nobody else on it.
He did not throw Crystal out. Kaylee is his daughter too now, in every way that matters, and he said she was not going to lose a home over her mother's mistake. But there were rules. Crystal sold the leggings at the Mesa swap meet every weekend until the garage was empty. She made back thirteen hundred dollars, and every dollar went to my textbooks. She took a cashier job at the grocery store. They started counseling and now keep separate accounts. A month later she apologized to me at the kitchen table, in front of Kaylee, "because she needs to see me say it." It was the first honest thing she ever said to me, and I believed her.
The part I did not expect came that same Saturday night. Kaylee knocked on my door in her unicorn pajamas, unzipped the little pocket on her bunny's back, and poured twenty-three dollars onto my bed. Crumpled ones and quarters. Her tooth fairy money. "For college," she said. "So you come back and visit me."
I started at ASU in August. One of Kaylee's dollar bills is taped inside my dorm closet. Every weekend I come home, I take her for a snow cone. She always orders the blue one, so her teeth turn blue, and she smiles at me with every single one of them.
Should my dad have forgiven Crystal, or was emptying that jar a line that can never be uncrossed?
