Because underneath the ridiculousness was something that had bothered me since childhood.
Mom had always treated Vance’s problems as emergencies the rest of us were responsible for solving.
And I was usually the one expected to solve them.
When I was seventeen, I worked overnight shifts at a diner and saved $2,300 for college expenses.
Vance wanted a used dirt bike.
Mom took $1,200 from my savings account.
When I discovered it missing, she told me,
“You have scholarships coming. Vance needs something good to happen to him.”
He rode the dirt bike for about a month.
Then abandoned it behind Dad’s shed.
I never got the money back.
At twenty-two, Vance enrolled in electrician school.
Mom begged me to pay part of the tuition.
I sent $2,200.
He quit after nine days.
His complaint?
The program focused too heavily on wiring.
I told him he should sue the electrician school for teaching electricity.
Mom stopped speaking to me for a month.
Years later, after Dad died, the financial support grew larger.
At first, I sent a few hundred dollars when Mom needed groceries.
Then I covered insurance.
Then property taxes.
Eventually, I simply created an automatic monthly transfer.
Every month, $1,850 went from my account to Evelyn.
It covered a large portion of the house.
Vance was theoretically responsible for groceries.
Sometimes he bought food.
Other times he contributed opinions about agriculture.
Then, ten months before Leo’s procedure, Mom called and said Vance needed additional help while he pursued comedy full-time.
She called it a “temporary financial bridge.”
I called it nonsense.
But I was exhausted, sitting in an airport lounge, and I didn’t have the energy for another battle.
So I added another automatic transfer.
$650 every month.
Directly to Vance.
He called it his Artist Incubation Fund.
I called it the Fee for Not Hearing About It.
Deep down, I knew exactly what I was doing.
I was enabling them.
But every time I tried to stop, Mom reminded me that I earned good money.
That I traveled.
That I had savings.
And then came the sentence I hated most:
“Diane, you can afford it.”
In my family, those words meant that if I possessed something extra, someone else had already claimed it.
Then Leo’s vision started getting worse.
And something inside me changed.
I still remember the appointment where the specialist explained how quickly his condition was progressing.
