Healing Rain Read Free Page B

while as we ate. After a few minutes of silence, Tyler stopped and put down his fork. “Hey Rain, are you going to get a car when you turn seventeen?”
    I smiled at him. “I doubt it, buddy. I don’t think that’s something I can afford right now. I have a little money saved, but not enough for a car.” It was sad to say that out loud. I missed my old car – a fabulous white SUV that I had gotten as my sixteenth birthday present from my parents. Of course, after all the craziness, we sold the car because my mom could not afford to keep making the payments, and the measly babysitting money I made off the neighbor’s kids back home was definitely not enough to help. When I offered to sell the car so that I could eventually get a cheaper one, I was really hoping to do so in time for my seventeenth birthday. But, with my birthday being only one month away combined with the fact that I had not gotten a new job since we moved to make any more money, I didn’t see that being possible.
    He looked at me with confusion. “Can’t Mom buy you one?”
    I sighed. Sometimes I forgot that he was only seven. I knew that he really didn’t understand all of the financial trouble we were in, and I didn’t want him to have to understand that. He was too young to worry about that kind of stuff. I tried to think of how I could phrase it delicately. “Well, Ty, I’m sure Mom will help me with one eventually. I just don’t think it will happen right away. Cars are really expensive, and it takes time to get enough money together to buy one.”
    He thought about that for a few minutes, and went back to eating his dinner. I thought I had satisfied his questions, but then he took me by surprise when he said, “But, we just sold that ginormous house we used to live in. Shouldn’t that give Mom enough money to buy you a car?”
    Man, he was smart for a seven-year-old. This was not really a subject I felt comfortable discussing with him. I thought for a minute, pretending to chew my food before I answered. “Well, buddy, here’s the thing. When Dad died, there were lots of things that our family still needed to pay for. Credit card bills and stuff like that.” Boy, was that an understatement! If I was telling him the truth, I would have added that most of those bills were bills that Mom hadn’t even known existed, because Dad had gotten the family into a lot of debt in secret. I also would have told him that Dad thought suicide would be the easy way out of it all, but that the ugly debt had followed us all the way out of our old “ginormous” house and into this tiny apartment five and a half hours away. I would have told him that the money from that house was not actually ours , because we were forced to sell that house when we couldn’t afford to stay there.
    But, obviously, I couldn’t tell him all of that. He wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want him to. I wanted him to remember Dad as the awesome guy that he had been – the guy that took us on vacations and rode roller coasters with us at amusement parks, who set up lighting equipment in our basement to make it look like a rock concert so we could jam out and pretend to be famous, who taught us how to fish and ride bikes and built forts with us. I didn’t want him to know all the bad stuff.
    So, I continued. “Well, we had to use the money from the house to pay for that kind of stuff instead. So, there’s not enough left over to buy a car,” I concluded. I watched his face as I spoke, wondering what he was going to ask me next. Surprisingly, he just nodded. I guess my answer had made sense in his mind, but he was still frowning and seemed to be thinking. Before he could say anything else about it, I decided to change the subject.
    â€œSo, are you excited to start second grade?” I asked him, putting on my sunniest smile and trying to forget about our