Free The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

midlife crises? We were always groaning about who was going to have to sit in the trunk, but Danny—even though we usually made him take the shit seat—was always really excited when his dad was coming to get us, because he was coming in a sports car. But the sports car was a Nissan! They couldn’t even get that right.)
    At any rate, the point is, they went on vacations. They came to our clubs. What made them poor were the inconsistencies, the strange, inexplicable differences from how we lived, how we did things. The Hatchet house, for example, was not what our mothers would have called well kept . The paint was chipping; the bushes were overgrown; the lawn wasn’t mown as often as it should have been. Mrs. Hatchet (who, at any given moment, seemed approximately five minutes away from crawling under a bed and crying her eyes out) installed lacey curtains when everyone else was putting in blinds. There were dust motes wherever there was sunshine strong enough to illuminate them. Their kitchen trash can never quite closed because the trash was always just a little too full. There were rooms with boxes that never got used (the rooms or the boxes). There were doors that we never saw opened—imagine that! The floors in the house were carpeted, and not just in the basement. Everything about Danny was slightly dirty, somewhat messy, and definitely a little bit smelly. He wore a patina of grime. A patina of gloom.
    But in the end, Danny was Danny. He was weird, yeah, but he was one of us. And he must have known it. Because if there were longings in Danny to be at any school other than ours, we never saw it. Other than being a generally downtrodden-type kid, he never seemed especially to notice that he lived differently than we did. Like with his dad’s Nissan. He genuinely believed that car was cool. And it never even occurred to him that we didn’t feel the same way.
    W hat we knew—what none of us was supposed to know but what each of us knew because our mothers couldn’t help themselves and so made us promise, one at a time, each believing she was the only mother spilling the beans and that it would never get around—was that Danny’s grandmother footed the bill. She footed the bill for almost everything. She footed the bill for the Hatchets’ house, their membership to the clubs, their annual Christmas trips up north, Mrs. Hatchet’s prescriptions, Mr. Hatchet’s spending sprees, and definitely Danny’s education.
    We had vague images of an old lady sitting by herself in a decaying mansion in New England, writing checks with Danny’s name on them. As children, we were jealous of that old lady. We wanted her to be our grandmother. We wanted checks of our own. We wanted better vacations. The things we could have done with that money! What we believed was that Danny didn’t know how to spend it, that Danny’s family didn’t know how to spend it. (Again, the Nissan.) We believed that the grandmother, in forgetting to pass along the gene for ambition and success to her son, Danny’s father, had also forgotten to pass along the gene for taste, for imagination, for knowing how to spend what you have.
    Of course, we got older. Mrs. Hatchet died our freshman year of high school. Danny’s father was in and out of rehab, and Danny himself seemed only a few years away from the same fate. The grandmother died. The checks stopped coming. Mr. Hatchet inherited, but not as much as he had hoped. He cut Danny off. It was for his own good, he said. Time to teach him responsibility, he said. But we were in our twenties by then, just out of college, too old to be taught anything we hadn’t already learned. That’s when Danny started calling, asking us for money. “Don’t do it,” our mothers said. “Mr. Hatchet said he’s only using the money to buy drugs.”
    “He should know,” we said under our breaths.
    “What’s that?” they asked.
    “Oh, nothing, nothing.”
    At first it was an us-against-them thing, and we