“What about your dad?”
“My dad was wonderful. He was as warm as she was cold. He worked long hours at an office job so my mom could stay home with me, but she left me to my own devices most of the time, and once I started school she disengaged even more. She never showed up for things a parent was supposed to show up for, but my dad always did. He’d take off work and would be sitting right in the front row of my school program or award ceremony. When I got a little older and started playing sports, he never missed a game.”
Kate’s heart broke for him. Her parents had always been there for her and Chad, cheering on their accomplishments and showing their support. Her mother had taken things one step further, acting as homeroom mother several years in a row for both her and Chad. Diane was the kind of parent who volunteered to bake five dozen cupcakes for the bake sale or sew costumes for the school play.
“My dad’s the one who introduced me to computers. He was fairly technical and had always been interested in programming. He had an old Commodore computer in the basement, and he used a textbook to show me how to write programs for it. I was only twelve, but it didn’t take long before I’d surpassed everything he taught me, and he was amazed at what I could make that computer do. I was fourteen when we started accessing the Internet from home via dial-up, and my dad and I spent hours online. It was like a whole new world had opened up for me. For him too, although in a vastly different way.”
Ian seemed lost in thought for a moment. “As I got older, I realized he hated his job and that the thing he wanted most was to be independently wealthy. My mom rode him pretty hard—nothing he did was ever good enough—and it was no secret that he didn’t like his boss. He wanted desperately to be a self-made man, but he could never figure out how to make it happen. Though he should have been, he wasn’t suspicious about the financial opportunities he found on the Internet, and he fell victim to an online pyramid scheme. It was fairly sophisticated and nearly impossible to identify it as a scam, and he lost everything he had. But worse than that was the blow to his pride. I remember hearing my parents fight, massive screaming arguments, my mom yelling about how foolish he’d been. They argued all the time after that, especially about money. About six months later, when I was at school and my mom was out, he came home from work and left the car running when he shut the garage door.”