“Dad, are you senile?” she scoffed, though her eyes darted around the room like she was looking for an exit that wasn’t there. “It’s a painting. You’re going to divorce Mom over a five-dollar watercolor set? That is pathetic.”
David didn’t look at her.
He walked past them both to his travel bag in the corner—the gray canvas one he’d had since I was a teenager, the one with the worn leather handle and the tiny embroidered initials. He knelt, unzipped it, and pulled out a black, leather-bound notebook. Thick. Heavy. The edges of the pages were frayed and soft, the spine deeply creased.
I’d seen that notebook my whole life, but never inside it. It lived in his office, or sometimes by his recliner. He’d written in it on airplanes, during long commercials, at the kitchen table when everyone else went to bed.
He carried it to the head of the table and set it down with a thud that made the glasses tremble.
“I have been a structural engineer for forty years,” he said, placing his palm flat on the cover. “My job is to track stress fractures. To find cracks before the building collapses. I track failures.”
He opened the book.
The pages were dense with his handwriting. Small, neat, precise. Columns of dates and numbers and short notations. It didn’t look like a diary. It looked like a log.
“Three years ago,” he said, letting his finger run down the margin, “you told me you needed five thousand dollars for a business loan.”
He looked at Jessica.
Jessica rolled her eyes, crossing her arms, leaning back like this was all a tedious inconvenience.
“Yeah, and I paid you back. Mostly. What is this, an audit?”
“You didn’t pay back a dime,” David said. His voice never rose. That made it worse. “But that’s not the point. The point is that’s when I started tracking. Not just the big loans. Everything.”
He turned the book around so the pages faced us. Continue reading…
