I want that in here before anything else, because it is the only part of this where the lottery ticket actually mattered.
Not the two point four million — that money was in a lawyer’s trust account and would not be accessible for eleven weeks.
The eight hundred and forty dollars.
Theo’s eight hundred and forty dollars, from our grandfather’s tools, plus a thing I did not expect.
When the clinic’s patient advocate — a retired hospital corpsman named Bernadette Pike — heard what my family had said on the phone, she made four calls in one afternoon and found a surgeon at a private orthopedic group who takes two service members a quarter at cost.
My share was eleven hundred dollars.
I had eight hundred and forty.
Bernadette covered the difference out of her own pocket and refused, for two years, to let me pay it back, and when I finally forced it on her she donated it to the clinic’s coffee fund and made a point of telling me she’d bought forty-one pounds of the good stuff with it.
So: the surgery cost eleven hundred dollars.
My parents said five thousand was impossible.
I never got the chance to find out whether they’d have paid the real number, and I have decided that not knowing is its own answer.
I walk fine now.
I limp when it rains and I cannot run more than three miles and I was medically reclassified, which ended the career I had planned, and I want to be precise: the delay didn’t cost me my leg.
It cost me about fifteen percent of it, permanently, and that fifteen percent is the difference between the job I had and the job I have.
Theo moved onto my couch that month.
I did not tell him about the ticket for nine days.
I have apologized for that twice and he has told me both times to stop.
What I did instead, on day two, was drive him to the pawn shop on Delmar with four hundred dollars of his own money in an envelope and buy back our grandfather’s tools, which had not sold because — the owner told us, embarrassed — “nobody wants an old man’s Snap-ons anymore, they want the ones with the app.”
Theo cried in the parking lot with a socket set on his knees.
He was twenty.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see them again.”
“Theo.”
“What?”
“I need you to listen to me and I need you to not argue.
Grandpa left you nineteen percent of a company.”
He looked at me like I had spoken a different language.
“Of what?”
“The yard.
Grandpa’s yard.
It’s still running.
It made a hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars in distributions in April.”
“Imara, I fix transmissions in a garage in Fairhaven.”
“I know.”
“They pay me eighteen dollars an hour.”
“I know, Theo.”
