That Sunday, I slept until nine.
At ten-thirty, Dad knocked on my door.
“You going shopping?”
I kept typing.
“No.”
There was a pause.
“You sick?”
“Nope.”
He waited.
I waited longer.
Eventually, he walked away.
By Tuesday, Mom noticed there was no fresh milk.
She used powdered creamer in her coffee and made a face.
By Wednesday, the bananas were gone.
By Friday, Dad opened the freezer and frowned.
“What happened to those chicken breasts?”
“You ate them.”
He looked offended by the concept.
“Aren’t there more?”
“No idea.”
“You usually buy more.”
I turned from the sink.
Three seconds passed before something flickered behind his eyes.
He remembered.
“Buy your own food.”
But pride was a powerful anesthetic.
Instead of apologizing, he shrugged.
“Well, your mother and I can obviously manage our own groceries.”
“Of course.”
That evening, they went shopping.
I heard the garage door rise, then Mom complaining because Dad had forgotten the reusable bags.
They returned forty minutes later carrying four plastic sacks.
Four.
My normal weekly run filled the back of my SUV.
Dad had bought sandwich bread, eggs, frozen dinners, cereal, lunch meat, and a bag of apples.
Mom had bought cookies and coffee creamer.
No vegetables.
No cooking oil.
No meat besides the lunch slices.
No household supplies.
It lasted five days.
Meanwhile, I ate well.
I had moved a portable induction burner onto a heatproof table in my room, along with one skillet and one saucepan I owned. I prepared salmon, rice bowls, pasta, omelets, and grilled chicken with the window cracked.
The smell drove Dad insane.
One evening, he stopped outside my room while garlic sizzled in olive oil.
“That smells good.”
“It is.”
He lingered.
“What are you making?”
“Dinner.”
He waited for an invitation.
None came.
His footsteps eventually moved down the hallway.
I felt strangely guilty for about thirty seconds.
Then I remembered his face when he had called me a leech.
That guilt evaporated.
The bigger problem was the bills.
The internet charge hit my account first.
Then electricity.
Then water.
I had paid them automatically for so long that Dad had apparently forgotten they existed.
I logged into each account and changed the automatic payment setting.
I didn’t shut anything off.
I simply scheduled my responsibility to end at the close of the current billing cycle and left the account information for my parents to take over.
That should have been the moment I told them exactly what I was doing.
I almost did.
Then, while I was walking downstairs Thursday evening, I heard Dad laughing on the phone.
“Fifteen people, maybe sixteen,” he said. “Big birthday barbecue. Steaks, ribs, the whole thing. You know me, Mark. I don’t cheap out when family comes over.”
I stopped halfway down the stairs.
His sixtieth birthday was three weeks away.
And while our refrigerator was already almost empty, my father had just promised fifteen relatives a feast he apparently expected me to finance.
That was when my quiet experiment became something else entirely.
### Part 3
Dad loved an audience.
The closer his birthday got, the more elaborate the party became.
He called my aunt Rachel and promised smoked ribs.
He told my cousin Jonah he was buying “the good steaks.”
He told Uncle Mark he had picked out several bottles of expensive wine.
He even bragged that Mom was making one of her famous layered chocolate cakes.
Mom hadn’t baked a layered cake in at least eight years.
I knew because the last time she tried, the top layer slid sideways during a Fourth of July cookout and landed frosting-first on the patio.
Still, Dad kept promising.
Every promise floated through the house like a check he assumed someone else would cash.
I said nothing.
By then, I had started packing.
Not dramatically.
One box at a time.
Books first.
Winter clothes.
Old college notebooks.
Then the framed photographs and small things I had accumulated during three years of living there.