I found the capacitor. It was swollen at the top like a can of bad beans. I showed it to her, and she nodded, and I went to the shelf where I keep spares in coffee cans labeled with masking tape, and while my back was turned she said, "Pauline said she'd been trying to pay you for twenty-eight years."
"She did say that."
"Has she?"
I stood with my hand in the coffee can. I could have said something easy. I'd been saying easy things to Margot for eighteen years, and they'd gotten so comfortable that they felt like the truth even to me. But she was standing in my garage holding her mother's flashlight, and she'd come to tell me something hard, and I didn't think I had the right anymore to give her something soft in return.
So I told her. I told her about the manila folder, and the two percent, and the envelopes every March, and the account at the credit union. I told her about Ohio State and Northwestern, and the money that was still there. I told her the numbers, because she's a grown woman and she deserved the numbers.
She didn't interrupt. When I finished, she set the flashlight down on the workbench very carefully, as if it might go off.
"Mom's insurance," she said.
"Margot—"
"I've told people that. I've told Peter that. At Mom's grave, every year, I say thank you. I literally stand there and say, Thanks, Mom, for school." Her voice was getting higher. "And that was Pauline? That was some restaurant? You let me think—you used Mom to—"
"It was your mother's idea."
That stopped her.
I told her the rest. The kitchen table. The cotton cap. Gloria's cold hand on mine. Don't make her feel like she owes anybody for who she gets to be.
Margot sat down on the overturned five-gallon bucket I keep by the workbench, the same way Pauline sat down on a bucket in a walk-in twenty-eight years ago, and she put her face in her hands. I stood there with a new capacitor in my fist and didn't know whether to go to her.
When she looked up, her face was wet, but she wasn't crying the way I expected. She was angry. She was angrier than I'd ever seen her.
"She was dying, Dad. She was dying, and she was scared, and she said something at a kitchen table, and you turned it into a law. For eighteen years." She wiped her face with her sleeve. "Do you know what it's like to find out the floor you've been standing on your whole life was built by people you didn't even know were there? I don't feel like I owe anybody. I feel like an idiot. I feel like a stranger to my own life."