Chapter 2: The Gospel of Debt
Barely thirteen months after we buried my father, Renata married Royal Busby.
Royal was a boisterous man who owned a lucrative landscaping empire. His surname was plastered in bold, green font across a fleet of heavy-duty trucks roaming the county. He came as a package deal with his eleven-year-old daughter, Kirsten, a girl who possessed her own actual pony—a concept so staggeringly glamorous to my grieving mind that it felt pulled from the pages of a fantasy novel.
We were quickly uprooted from our modest life and transplanted into Royal’s domain in Glen Allen: a sprawling, brick colonial fortress boasting a three-car garage and a front lawn manicured with the obsessive precision of a PGA golf course.
I desperately tried to acclimatize. I truly wanted to love our new blended reality. But the economic physics of the Busby household became glaringly apparent within months.
Kirsten was enrolled at Holy Rosary Academy, an elite Catholic institution requiring crisp plaid skirts, mandatory chapel attendance, and exorbitant fees for the varsity rowing team. I, on the other hand, was sent to the overcrowded public high school a mile down the highway. Kirsten upgraded from a pony to competitive equestrian jumping lessons, which naturally segued into a ten-day cultural immersion trip to Italy with her Latin class.
I got a part-time job at a neon-lit frozen custard stand the week I turned sixteen, solely because I desperately wanted a smartphone data plan so I wouldn’t be a social pariah.
During those years, Renata developed a relentless, weaponized catchphrase. She deployed it so frequently that my cousins and I used to mockingly mouth the words behind her back at family barbecues.
“After everything I’ve spent on you…”
If I tentatively asked for a new pair of track shoes, if I begged for a ride home in the rain rather than walking, if I dared to bring home a B-minus in Chemistry, Renata’s jaw would tighten, her eyes would ice over, and she would hiss, “After everything I’ve spent on you, Jana.”
Every time she said it, a heavy, invisible stone was added to a backpack I carried everywhere. I felt it land like a suffocating, lifelong debt I had incurred simply by existing. I assumed she was referring to the mundane arithmetic of my survival: the metallic braces on my teeth, the discounted clothing, the sheer caloric cost of feeding a depressed teenager under her new husband’s roof. I genuinely believed my grief and my presence were bankrupting her.
The spring I turned sixteen, my AP History class organized a three-day excursion to Washington D.C. It included a chartered luxury bus, two nights in a hotel with an indoor pool, and VIP access to the Smithsonian museums. The total cost was $340.
I brought the crumpled permission slip home and left it tentatively on the granite kitchen island, right beside Renata’s designer purse. She stared at the paper for what felt like an hour. Finally, she sighed, a long, theatrical exhalation of martyrdom.
“Jana, do you have any earthly idea how tight things are around here? After everything I spent on you this fiscal year alone? Your orthodontist bill isn’t even fully amortized yet.”
“Okay,” I whispered, shrinking into myself. “I understand.”
I didn’t argue. Instead, I pleaded with my manager at the custard stand for double shifts. For five grueling weeks, my forearms were coated in a perpetual, sticky glaze of vanilla and grease. I paid for that Washington trip myself, handing my history teacher a white envelope stuffed with crinkled ten and twenty-dollar bills. From that day forward, I never asked my mother to fund a school activity again.
That exact same April, Kirsten jetted off to Rome, Florence, and Venice. Renata personally drove her to the airport at four in the morning, weeping with pride at the departure curb. Upon Kirsten’s return, a professionally framed eight-by-ten photograph of her tossing a coin into the Trevi Fountain was erected on the living room mantle. It remained there, an altar to her privilege, for years.
I never once asked who financed the Italian excursion. It simply never occurred to my conditioned mind to question it.
The ultimate trap was sprung in February of 2018, the week I legally became an adult.
Renata corralled me at the kitchen table, sliding a thick, stapled stack of legal documents toward me. Her voice was uncharacteristically soft, dripping with maternal encouragement. “These are the federal financial aid applications for your community college, sweetie,” she purred.
I was so intoxicatingly thrilled at the prospect of escaping that house and starting college that the adrenaline blinded me. I didn’t read a single paragraph of the dense legalese. She hovered over my shoulder, pointing a perfectly manicured fingernail at the blank lines. I scrawled my name eleven times using a cheap purple gel pen.
When the ink was dry, she whisked the papers into a manila folder, pressed a warm kiss to the crown of my head, and smiled.
Two months later, on a crisp morning in April, I walked out the front door to find a brand-new, silver Honda Civic idling in the pristine driveway. A colossal, obnoxious red velvet bow was magnetized to the hood. It was Kirsten’s sweet sixteen. Renata darted around the vehicle, snapping a hundred photos on her phone, crying tears of joy.
I packed my bags that summer. I signed a lease on a cramped two-bedroom apartment with three other girls from the custard stand. I funded my entire community college education through a mountain of federal student loans. I worked thirty hours a week to keep the lights on. Nobody offered me a dime of assistance, and true to my conditioning, I never asked.
The following summer, in 2019, Royal’s landscaping crew excavated the backyard to install a custom in-ground swimming pool. It featured a cascading waterfall constructed from synthetic boulders and underwater LEDs that cycled through the color spectrum. I only knew about it because I saw it broadcast on Kirsten’s Instagram feed. There was a lavish launch party with forty guests. In the background of one video, Renata was laughing uproariously in a wide-brimmed straw hat, holding a margarita.
I wasn’t on the guest list. I swallowed the bitter pill, lying to myself that I wouldn’t have attended even if invited.
When the pandemic paralyzed the world in 2020, Royal dramatically announced over dry turkey at Thanksgiving that the landscaping business was on the brink of catastrophic failure. Miraculously, despite this alleged insolvency, he purchased two brand-new, heavy-duty commercial trucks the very next month.
I finally reached the finish line of my twenty-fifth year in February 2025.
By then, the concept of my father’s trust had become a faint, nagging itch in the back of my mind—like remembering a winter coat you accidentally left at a friend’s house a decade ago. I wasn’t expecting a windfall. I naively hoped that perhaps three or four thousand dollars had survived, just enough to make a dent in the suffocating principal of my student loans.
In early March, I cautiously broached the topic with Renata over the phone.
“Oh, honey,” she sighed, her tone dripping with condescending pity. “That tiny little fund? That’s all gone. It was completely exhausted just keeping you alive.”
“Exhausted?” I echoed, my stomach plummeting.
“Do you have the slightest comprehension of the economic burden of raising a child for thirteen years as a single mother?” she snapped, the familiar ice returning to her voice. “Your orthodontic work alone cost a fortune! After everything I spent on you, Jana, and now you have the audacity to call me demanding a handout?”
I apologized profusely. I stammered that I was ignorant of the costs. I believed her completely. I had swallowed her narrative my entire life. Why would a mother ever lie to her own flesh and blood about something so sacred?
Because, I was about to discover, some mothers do not see daughters. They only see ledgers.
