“His father paid for it,” I said, sitting on the arm of the chair opposite her. “Stephen took him to the shop on Grand River Avenue.”
Joyce folded a blue pair of work socks and placed them on the neat stack to her right.
“Stephen does not spend five dollars without expecting ten dollars back in change,” she said.
She pointed a finger toward the kitchen counter, where the white paper of the Michigan State University invoice sat under a magnet shaped like an apple.
“Has he signed the parent portion of the tuition papers yet?” she asked.
“He said he was waiting on his quarterly draw from the residential project in Troy,” I said, though the date on the letter was clear.
“The deadline is September fifteenth,” Joyce said, her hands coming to rest in her lap, fingers interlaced and perfectly still.
I went back into the kitchen after she left, the house quiet except for the hum of the old compressor. Dustin’s backpack was slumped against the leg of the kitchen table, its canvas straps worn thin and gray at the seams from his high school years.
