Chapter 23: The First

I did not check my account at midnight.

I lay on the blue quilt with the phone face down on my chest, and I made myself wait until the window turned gray.

At six I went down to the kitchen.

Norman was already cracking eggs into the steel bowl.

"Happy New Year," he said. "You look like a man with a phone in his pocket."

"It's the first."

"I know what day it is. I've owned a calendar for sixty-one years."

I sat down on the stool by the prep table and turned the phone over.

There were two notifications, stacked, one under the other.

The first said Deposit, seven hundred fifty dollars, From G. Lasker, standing order.

The second said Deposit, seven hundred fifty dollars, From M. Lasker.

Her memo was one word, the same as before.

It said Eat.

I read them, and then I read them again, slowly, with my thumb under each line.

Nothing felt different in the kitchen.

The eggs went on cracking, and the stove clicked before it lit.

But the account ended in 9208, and both numbers had landed in the right place on the right day, with no screenshot of a zero beneath them.

I opened the family chat, the new one Mom had made on Christmas night, with only three names.

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