When My Parents Charged Me by the Minute for Their Love I Left Chapter 05

When My Parents Charged Me by the Minute for Their Love I Left Chapter 05

It was just getting light when the plane landed.

I switched on my phone, and dozens of messages appeared at once.

Dad asked where I had gone.

Mom wrote, “Come home when you’ve calmed down. We’re not going to hold this against a child.”

The final message had been sent at two in the morning.

[The three-hour monthly rule has been cancelled.]

I stared at the words for a long time.

If the twelve-year-old me had seen them, she probably would have clutched the phone and cried.

But now, I simply muted all notifications from them.

The university’s international student coordinator was waiting at the exit with my name on a sign.

She took one of my suitcases.

“Is this all you have?”

“This is everything.”

I didn’t tell her I had sold everything else.

The gifts my parents had given me had become my tuition, airfare, and accommodation for the first

semester.

My dorm room was small.

Outside the window was a street I had never seen before.

I placed Grandma’s photograph on the desk, then set the broken cassette recorder beside it.

That evening, my roommate invited me out for dinner.

I didn’t go.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I just had to watch every cent I spent.

At the supermarket, I bought the cheapest bread and eggs I could find.

At the checkout, the person in front of me had a hot chicken sandwich from the deli. Steam curled from the

edge of the wrapper, carrying the smell of roasted chicken.

I stopped in my tracks.

When I was twelve, I had stared at my classmate’s lunch exactly the same way.

Back then, I hadn’t dared buy one.

The forty extra minutes Mom had spent with me in hospital had cost me an entire month’s living allowance.

I stood by the display for a long time.

In the end, I picked up a sandwich too.

Back in my dorm room, I took my first bite.

The heat burned the tip of my tongue, and suddenly tears began to fall.

No one hurried me.

No one asked whether that meal was worth spending part of my budget on.

I slowly ate half, wrapped the rest, and put it in the refrigerator.

In the middle of the night, Mom called again.

I watched the screen light up, then go dark.

She sent a voice message.

“Where exactly are you? I’ve cancelled the three-hour rule. From now on, we’ll spend as much time with you

as you want.”

I didn’t open it.

Back home, night had already fallen.

When Mom and Dad returned to the apartment, they found, for the first time, that my room was empty.

Only a few bare hangers remained in the wardrobe.

The family-time tracking card and a stack of pawnshop receipts lay inside the drawer.

The watch from my first year of high school.

The diamond necklace from my fifteenth birthday.

The designer handbag from my sixteenth.

One by one, they had all been sold.

Dad was silent for a long time.

“If she needed money for living expenses, why didn’t she come to us?”

Mom didn’t answer.

The back of the tracking card on the dining table was covered in my tiny handwriting.

[Parent-teacher conference: forty minutes.]

[Birthday dinner: reserve twenty minutes.]

[When ill, use as little as possible.]

The last line had been written when I was fourteen.

[Grandma is gone. I need to save even more from now on.]

Mom’s hand suddenly trembled.

The card slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor.

Dad bent down to pick it up, but his phone rang.

His assistant spoke carefully.

“Mr Parker, Miss Madison still has 176 minutes left this month. Under the old rule, they’ll expire

automatically at the end of the month.”

The living room fell so quiet that only their breathing could be heard.

A long time passed before Dad finally spoke.

“Don’t send reminders like that again.”

The assistant hesitated.

“What about the records from the past twelve years?”

Dad’s grip on the phone slowly tightened.

“Send me all of them.”

That night, for the first time, they began to look through exactly how I had used those hours.

And by then, I was already fast asleep in a dorm room on another continent.