against whatever she could provide in return.
Her older sister Meredith never had to learn that math. Meredith got a new Volkswagen Jetta with a bow on it for her sixteenth birthday. Wendy got their mother’s old Toyota Camry with a broken air conditioner and a passenger window that wouldn’t seal — handed down reluctantly, like something being disposed of. When Meredith wanted to redecorate her bedroom, five thousand dollars appeared for an interior designer. When Wendy asked her father to fix the leak in her ceiling that dripped every time it rained, he said he’d get to it eventually.
He never did.
She positioned a plastic bucket under the drip and emptied it every morning before school. The steady sound of it became the soundtrack to her teenage years.
Meredith got a fully funded private college education — dorm fees, monthly spending money, sorority dues, all of it. Wendy got student
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