His mother wrote the number on a yellow legal pad, the way she had written everything for the twenty-six years she ran Minneha Elementary, in a slanted hand that leaned forward like it was walking into wind.
She did it on a Sunday in the middle of October, after the pot roast and before the pie, while Bryony was in the den with the television turned low and her feet tucked under her on the green sofa that had been in that den since Barrett was in the fourth grade. Winifred Vandermeer did not raise her voice. She had never needed to. She tore the page off the pad along its perforation, which she always did slowly so it would not rip, and she folded it once and set it next to his coffee cup on the kitchen table, and then she went to the counter and began cutting the pie into eight exact pieces.
"Read it after," she said. "Not in front of her."
He read it then, of course, while her back was turned. He was forty-four years old and he still did that.
Club volleyball, Prairie Fire 17 Gold, fall and spring season: $4,200.
Tournament travel, Kansas City and Omaha, hotels and meals: approximately $1,900.
Honda Civic, 2017, silver: $6,500 (she says).
ACT tutoring, private, twice weekly since June: approximately $1,600.
Amparo: birthday party at the trampoline place, iPad, the pottery classes at the Arts Center, the bicycle: approximately $2,400.
Clothing, both girls, back to school (I have eyes): $1,500 at the very least.
Itzel, the senior portraits with the woman from Andover, the class ring, application fees: approximately $1,100.
At the bottom, underlined twice: Twenty thousand dollars, or within a few hundred of it, since April.
And under that, smaller, not underlined at all, as if it did not need to be: Bryony asked for one band trip.
He folded the page back along its crease. In the den, a studio audience laughed at something, and Bryony did not laugh with it, and he could see the top of her head over the back of the green sofa, the dark brown part in her hair that she had started doing on the left side that summer because a girl in jazz band did it that way.
"Mom," he said.
"I am not telling you what to do." Winifred laid a slice of pie on a plate and wiped the server clean with a paper towel before she cut the next one. "I am telling you what I've seen. I'm allowed to see things. I see