On my sister’s birthday, my parents demanded that I buy her a $45,000 car, warning me, “if you refuse, go live in an orphanage.” I was stunned, but quietly started planning my response. When her birthday arrived, I handed her a toy car instead. Furious, my parents smashed a car in the driveway—but I couldn’t stop laughing, because the vehicle they destroyed was not actually mine.
On my sister’s twenty-first birthday, my parents called me to the kitchen table. My father, Robert, pushed a dealership brochure toward me and tapped the picture of a pearl-white SUV.
“Forty-five thousand,” he said flatly. “Sabrina deserves it.”
