"—as parents," he said, his voice going flatter, "to put some resources where they were needed most right now. Grant has been driving four hours round trip in a truck with two hundred and forty thousand miles on it. He's injured. He needs to feel like this family believes in him. That's not nothing, Josephine. A young man's confidence is not nothing."
"So you bought him a BMW," I said. "With my college fund."
"It was not your college fund," my father said. "Legally, that account is in your mother's name. That's how those accounts work. It's ours."
"Grandma put that money in every month for fifteen years. For me. She wrote my name on it."
"Your grandmother," my mother said, and her voice did something strange, went thin and high and then caught, "your grandmother had a lot of ideas about how things should be done. And she's not here, and we are, and we're the ones raising you."
"Josie, listen," my father said. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table, the reasonable posture, the dock-sale posture. "You are the smartest person in this house. Everybody knows it. You're going to get scholarships. You're going to get outside money. Your first year, you take some loans, that's what loans are for, everybody does it. And your grandmother set up a trust with the proceeds from her house, and that pays out to your mother when you're in college. Your sophomore year. We'll put it back then. We'll put back every penny. Nobody is taking anything from you. We're just moving it around."
I looked at my mother. "You'd pay it back with Grandma's trust."
"That's what it's for," my mother said. "That money was always going to come to me. It's the same money, Josie. It's all family money."
"It's not the same," I said. "Vanderbilt is ninety thousand dollars a year. My grant covers thirty. The family contribution is fifty-eight thousand dollars a year, Dad. A year. Without the 529 you can't pay that. I know you can't pay that. I've heard you on the phone with Dale."
My father's face changed. Not much. A muscle near his jaw.
"You don't talk about my business," he said quietly. "You don't know a thing about my business."
"I know you're behind with Lakeshore Aluminum. I know you couldn't get the car financed. That's why you paid cash. That's why you needed Grandma's account, because it was the only money in this house that wasn't already spent."
"That's enough," my father said.
"Grant," I said. I turned to my brother. He was staring at his plate. "Did you know?"