Chapter 3

No, I'd watched Stewart grow up from the time he was a boy. However useless he might be, he'd never do something like scheming against his own father.

There was only one explanation.

Something in this family was being kept from me, and it was something big.

That whole day, I felt like I'd lost my soul.

In the evening, when I couldn't stand the restlessness anymore, I went to the neighborhood park to play chess with my old colleague, Peter.

Peter was a shrewd man. Before he retired, he'd handled mediation in the company's union, and he'd seen every kind of family squabble there was.

After I lost three games in a row, Peter noticed something was wrong with me.

"Garry, you just walked your rook right into my mouth. Your head's not in the game. What is it? That precious son of yours upset you again?"

I sighed, pushed the chess pieces aside, and told Peter everything that had happened over the past two days, including the shopping receipt, from start to finish.

When I'd finished, Peter picked up his thermos, took a sip of wellness tea, and gave a cold laugh.

"Garry, Garry, you've been sharp your whole life. How is it that now, in your old age, you've gone soft in the head about family?"

I looked at him, confused. "How am I soft in the head? Is it wrong to help my own son?"

"Your mistake is that you've helped too long, and too fully!"

Peter rapped the stone table with his knuckles, making a crisp sound.

"Think about it. Money is a thing that changes flavor over time."

"The first year you give them money, that's charity in a snowstorm. The two of them are grateful, thankful to the bone."

"The second year you give again, and it becomes a habit. They start to feel it's owed to them."

"By the third year, you're emptying yourself out to prop them up, regular as clockwork. To greedy people, that's a 'vested interest.' Why on earth would they give it up?"

My heart sank as I listened, and I argued back, "But Penelope offered on her own to cut it down to three thousand."

"That's because she's clever!" Peter gave a cold snort. "If she'd kept asking for five thousand, even your son wouldn't have gone along with it. She retreated to advance. Asking for three thousand, she gets a good name as a dutiful, sensible daughter-in-law, and she keeps her grip on your wallet all the same. It's called a slow, steady trickle. Understand?"

Peter leaned in closer and lowered his voice. "As for your son Stewart... he is, after all, your own flesh and blood."

"When a son with a conscience sees his old father in worn-out clothes, eating discounted food, while his own wife blows the old man's hard-earned money, the guilt eats at him. It can drive a man mad."

"When he slammed the table last night, it wasn't at you. It was at his own uselessness, and at his wife's greed!"

Peter's words were like an extremely sharp scalpel, cutting cleanly through the cloth that had been draped over my eyes.

That night, I couldn't sleep.

I tossed and turned in bed, my mind full of Peter's words and Stewart's bloodshot eyes.

I dug out the yellowed savings book from the drawer.

It recorded how the savings of my whole life had been drained away.

Five years ago, when Stewart got married, the engagement gift came to a hundred and eighty thousand, and I put in more than half of a lifetime's savings.

Three years ago, when they were buying a place, they were short two hundred thousand on the down payment, and I threw in the last of my burial money.

And these three years, the five thousand every month had drained my daily life like blood being drawn from a vein.

I thought I was paving the way for my son, but I never imagined I was driving him into a moral dead end.

No, I couldn't just sit here and wait to die.

I had to find out exactly how hard Stewart's situation really was, and just what Penelope had been up to behind my back.

I wanted to see it with my own eyes.