Just because the kid was eighteen didn’t mean we wouldn’t have to pay for his car and insurance and clothing and food when he stayed with me and—
He wasn’t grown! And we certainly hadn’t finished raising him yet.
Maybe I’d been too hasty in kicking Mitch out, because we still had several things to discuss.
Nope. I will take on two jobs, one as a trash collector, if that’s what I have to do to make sure that Dylan gets what he needs.
“I’m going to guess that plan doesn’t cover everything,” Dylan said as he looked down at the floor. “I’ll just move home and go to Kennesaw State.”
“Honey, no! We’ll make it work.” I would make Mitch make it work. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have the money.
I stifled the urge to reach for my phone and check all the bank accounts again. I knew I could check all the college fund statements later. They were in my office.
And then I had the inheritance from my father. We could use that in a pinch. “I have an IRA that we can use if we have to.”
“An IRA? Mom, that’syourmoney.” Dylan looked up at me, and I watched the emotions play across his face. Once again, it reminded me of all the emotions Mitch had shown. Only there was an extra one, an emotion that looked a lot like embarrassment.
“Yeah, remember when Grandpa Richard died? He left me some money, and I put it away. It’s not enough for your entire college costs, but it will help—especially considering the scholarship you got.”
“Mom, I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose that scholarship.”
“What?”
“I have a C in Latin. And in English.”
“English?” Latin I could kinda understand, but English?
“The professor is really, really tough. She didn’t want me to skip English 101 and go straight into American Lit, and I’m having a hard time making good grades in the class.”
“But you made a five on the AP exam. Have you been to office hours?”
“No, but—”
“No buts. It’s October, and you can still pull your grades up, I bet. In fact—”
“Mom, I don’t want to.”
All his life Dylan had wanted to go to UT Knoxville, just like his parents. Mitch had taken him to football games and basketball games. He’d worn orange even when it would’ve been much easier to assimilate to Georgia Bulldog red and black. He’d stuck with UT through some truly disastrous football seasons. The poor child hadn’t really ever known a winning football team.
Not that he loved UT only for football reasons. Dylan knew that at least two of the Rhodes Scholars from UT Knoxville had studied political science, and he was interested in that topic as well as his stated major of communications. I hated to see him give up his dream due to some jitters or freshman weed-out courses or whatever the heck was going on.
“Dylan, are you going to class? Studying all that you can?”
“I started off fine, but then I got a little off course in September.”
“Then you can just get back on course.”
“Mom, I don’t like Knoxville like I thought I would.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone but your grandmother.”
He leaned forward, all wide-eyed, reminding me of when he was a precocious preschooler. “What?”
“I hated my first semester at UT.”
“You did?”
I nodded. “My mother wouldn’t let me come home until I’d finished a year.”
