I woke up early on Saturday.
Not because I had somewhere to be. Just because I'd been up since five thinking about this and I needed to do it before I talked myself into waiting longer.
I went downstairs and knocked on my mom's door.
She opened it in her robe, half-asleep, already reading my face trying to figure out if something was wrong. I told her to sit down. She sat on the edge of her bed and I pulled the envelope out of my hoodie pocket and set it on the comforter between us.
"Twenty thousand dollars," I said. "It's yours."
She looked at the envelope. Then at me. Then at the envelope again.
"Jordan." Her voice came out different. Not loud. Just compressed, like she was trying to keep something inside it. "What is this."
"I saved it. I've been working. Producing, doing jobs, saving. This is yours I want you to use it on bills, whatever you need, so you can work less. So you can breathe a little."
She picked up the envelope and held it and didn't say anything for a second. Then she put her hand over her mouth.
"Oh my God, Jordan."
And then she was hugging me, hard, I let her. I held on and didn't say anything because there wasn't anything to say, and because I knew if I started talking, I might say something that made it complicated.
It wasn't enough to retire her. I knew that. She'd still be working, still be doing doubles sometimes. But it was enough to matter. Enough to make the next few months breathe different. That was worth something.
I told her to go back to sleep. She didn't argue.
* * *
I woke up Rue first because she was harder.
She rolled over when I knocked and looked at me through one eye I told her to get up, we were going out. She said where. I said shopping. She stared at me for a long moment, then sat up.
Gia was easier she was already half-awake and the word shopping had her out of bed before I finished the sentence.
Mom wanted to sleep in. I told her we'd be back. She was already drifting off again when I closed her door.
* * *
Gia first, because that part was simple.
I'd thought about it before our last birthdays, what I'd gotten each of them, which was nothing, because things were the way they were and I hadn't had it. I'd been thinking about this since before I started working for Zen. Gia liked almost everything. She didn't have preferences that were hard to meet. She just wanted things and appreciated them genuinely and moved on. So I got her a phone a real one, not whatever cracked hand-me-down she'd been using and I told her if she ever needed anything she could just ask me.
Her face when she opened the box was worth more than the phone cost. She screamed. She grabbed my arm with both hands and shook it. I told her to stop.
She didn't stop.
* * *
Rue was harder because Rue is always harder.
I'd been thinking about what to get her for longer than I wanted to admit. The honest version of the problem was this: Rue didn't really want things. She wanted one thing, and it was the thing I wasn't going to give her, and anything else was just filling space around that absence. She'd liked motorcycles since we were kids, always had, but I didn't trust her on one yet. Not the way things were. She was doing better genuinely better but better and stable enough to be trusted with a motorcycle at 60 plus miles an hour were two different things. And cash was out. I wasn't going to hand my sister a stack of money and watch her have one bad afternoon.
So I'd found something in the middle.
The electric bike was black, low-profile, nothing flashy. Capped at forty miles an hour. Helmet came with it, full-face, actually rated for something. I'd thought about the ceiling for a while forty felt like the line between fun and me calling hospitals. She could still crash it. I knew that. But I'd decided that was a risk I could live with in a way I couldn't live with the other options.
She stood there looking at it for a long moment.
"It's electric," she said.
"Yeah."
"So it's quiet."
"Mostly."
Another beat. Then she looked at me and I couldn't fully read her face, which was normal for Rue, and she said, "It goes forty?"
"Tops."
She nodded slowly like she was doing math. Then she picked up the helmet and turned it over in her hands, checking the construction the way I'd shown her to check things when we were kids looking for where it was built cheap, where it would fail.
It held up. I'd made sure of that.
"Okay," she said.
Not excited. Not the way Gia was excited. But Rue's okay landed different it meant she'd accepted something, which was its own thing. I'd take it.
I put the helmet on her head and adjusted the strap. She let me.
* * *
We stopped for food on the way back. Sat in a booth, the three of us, and Gia spent twenty minutes setting up her new phone while Rue and I ate and didn't say much. At some point Rue looked up and said, "Where'd you actually get fifty thousand dollars, Jordan."
Not a question exactly. More like something she was saying out loud that she'd already been thinking.
I picked up my drink. "Producing. Shows. I've been stacking for a while."
She looked at me for a second. I looked back. We'd been doing that our whole lives having conversations in silence and I watched her decide something and then let it go.
"Okay," she said. Same word as before. Different meaning.
Gia looked up from her phone. "Can you get me AirPods too?"
"No," I said.
"What about—"
"No."
She went back to her phone. Rue almost smiled. I finished my food.
We drove home in the afternoon light with the bike in the back of the car, and I kept my eyes on the road, and I didn't think about where the money had come from. I was good at that by now. I'd gotten good at a lot of things I hadn't meant to.
He gave my mom twenty thousand dollars and told her he'd been saving. She believed him. I almost believed him too, which is the part that scared me. Not that he lied — I expected that. But that he was so good at it. So steady. So completely ordinary-looking while he said it.
I looked at him across the table at lunch and I wanted to ask him the real question. Not where did the money come from but what are you doing out there, Jordan, and is it going to catch up to you, and are you okay, are you actually okay. But I didn't. I let it go like I always let it go because asking would've meant having the answer and I wasn't sure I was ready for that.
He adjusted my helmet strap. He'd always done stuff like that. Little things. Checking the construction so it wouldn't fail. Making sure I'd be okay.
I just kept hoping he was doing the same for himself.