Chapter Six
Tatum
The professor says the company’s name at 11:40 on a Tuesday, and my pen stops moving.
“Bardon Automotive,” he repeats, tapping the projector remote.
“Two hundred and six plaintiffs and counting. Consolidated last spring. And what makes this one instructive for our purposes—” he pauses, delighted with himself, “—is that discovery produced internal testing data. Ipso facto, the manufacturer knew.”
Bardon.
I know that name.
I know it the way you know a word you learned before you knew what words were for.
Cardboard boxes stacked three deep along the back wall of the shop, that ugly orange logo on every one of them.
Two summers of sitting on an overturned crate sorting invoices into folders for ten dollars a day because Tyler said filing built character, and I said filing built boredom.
He laughed and gave me the ten dollars anyway.
Every one of those invoices said Bardon across the top.
The room keeps going. Somebody asks a question about causation. The professor answers it. I don’t hear any of it.
The manufacturer knew.
I’m out of my seat before the lecture ends.
***
The farthest carrel on the fourth floor of the library is empty—it’s always empty—because nobody else will sit in a chair that lists eleven degrees to the left.
I read for two hours.
The suit covers eight years of parts. Steering components, brake assemblies, suspension. There’s a filing from March with a list of incidents attached, and I read all forty pages of it twice. There are eleven crashes in it that Bardon settled quietly before anyone thought to consolidate.
Four years ago, Lachlan told a hospital room that something felt wrong with the car.
Four years ago, nobody wrote it down, because the man saying it was the man they were about to charge.
I print everything. Ninety-one pages, eleven dollars in printing credit, and the machine jams twice. I stand there and let it because I’m not leaving without this.
I put it in a folder. Green, the only one I have, with LEGAL STUDIES written on the front in my own handwriting from September.
Then I go to find him.
***
He isn’t home.
That’s fine. I let myself in with the key he gave me two weeks ago, which he handed over without ceremony, like it was nothing, like I didn’t sit in my car afterward for ten minutes holding it.
I put the folder on the counter where he’ll see it. I make coffee. I take my shoes off and put them by the door the way he likes, and I feel absurdly, stupidly happy, because I keep imagining his face.
Not relief. He won’t do relief. He’ll go very still, the way he does, and then he’ll say something short and flat that means more than it sounds like.
I want to be looking at him when he reads the part about the testing data.
While I wait, I decide to leave him a note with the case number on it, in case he wants to look it up before I get here. My pen’s in my bag. Paper isn’t.
There’s a drawer he cleared out for me—second one down, next to the sink, mostly holding a phone charger, a hair tie, and a paperback I left here. I open the one above it by mistake.
It’s full of paper.
I’m already sliding it shut when I register what I’m seeing.
I open it again.
Bank statements. A lot of them, squared into a stack the way he squares everything, four years of them, the oldest on the bottom.
I lift out the top one, and at first, I don’t understand what I’m looking at. Then I do.
There’s a transfer on it. Monthly, the same date every month. The recipient line has my university on it.
Under it, another. My name. My apartment deposit, from sophomore year, the one I cried about because I didn’t think Tyler’s money would stretch.
I sit down on his kitchen floor with the whole stack in my lap, and I go through it. All of it. Four years, in order, and by the time I reach the bottom of the pile I’m shaking so hard the pages rattle.
There was never any inheritance.
There was never a savings account, or a life insurance policy, or a careful older brother who thought ahead. There was Lachlan, in a cell, moving money to a girl he wouldn’t take a phone call from.
I know your address. I know your major.
He said that to me in the dark in my dorm room, and I heard it. But I let it go because I wanted him to keep talking.
Of course, he knew everything. People who pay tuition get reports.
I picked something else to think about instead. Something that hadn’t happened yet and might.
You. Graduating.
My hand comes up over my mouth.
He wasn’t imagining it. He was funding it.
And underneath all of it, something colder is assembling itself.
He wouldn’t see me. Not at the hospital, not once in four years of visitation, not a letter, not a call.
He sent money and nothing else. And then I turned up at his door and made it impossible to do anything but let me in.
Now, I’m on his kitchen floor finding out that the only relationship we’ve ever had is one where he pays, and I don’t get told the truth.
Where does a man in prison get four years of tuition?
The question forms, and I push it away because I’m not ready for the answer. Yet some part of me already has it.
I’m still on the floor when I hear his key in the lock.