PART 2: The Weight of the Boots

The cardboard box didn’t hold a pile of crumpled twenties, nor did it contain five years of rent money resting in a single stack.

Inside sat five thick, yellowed manila envelopes, each neatly labeled with a year—18, 19, 20, 21, 22. Atop the envelopes rested a worn, leather-bound savings ledger with my name written on the front in Dad’s cramped, heavy-handed block letters: CODY.

My hands shook so violently I had to lean against the edge of the kitchen table just to stay upright. Dewey pulled out a chair and gently pushed me down into it—into Dad’s old chair, the one he had sat in every single evening after a twelve-hour shift at the mill.

“Go on,” Dewey said softly, his voice gravelly with emotion. “Look inside.”

I peeled open the first envelope. Out slid a crisp stack of bank receipts alongside a cashier’s certificate. The date on the very first deposit receipt made my stomach drop: it was dated the exact afternoon of my eighteenth birthday, just hours after he had handed me that scrap of paper requiring $250 a month.

I tore open the second envelope, then the third, then the rest. Every single bill I had ever handed him—the crumpled twenty-dollar bills from late nights stocking shelves at Hy-Vee, the shift-change money, the cash I had scraped together while gluing the soles back onto my work shoes—had gone straight into a high-yield account he opened in secret.

Not a single penny was missing. But it was what lay at the bottom of the box beneath the envelopes that broke me entirely.

It was a small blue ledger, its pages filled with his jagged handwriting. It was a line-by-line diary of every expense he had trimmed from his own life so he could stretch his paychecks further.

• Skipped lunch to cover Cody’s dental bill.
• Cancelled cable. Put extra toward the interest on Cody’s fund.
• Resoled my boots with duct tape. Cody needs new tires for winter.

I stared at the pages, the ink blurring through my tears. All those times I had watched him walk into the house with a brand-new fishing rod or a six-pack of beer, bitter at what I thought was his selfishness—I realized now. The fishing rod was a fifty-cent garage sale find he spent three weeks restoring by hand. The beer was cheap store-brand lager he only drank when he was too exhausted to sleep.