My father once told me I was the spine of the family. Seven years later, he told a judge I was a thief. Both statements were made with the same voice: steady, certain, the voice of a man who had never once considered the possibility that he might be wrong.
Gerald Price did not wonder. Gerald Price declared. And for twenty-three years, I believed every declaration, because when your father speaks like the weather report, you do not question whether it is raining.
You just grab an umbrella. The umbrella, in my case, was a calculator, then a spreadsheet, then a full accounting system I built from scratch at sixteen because my mother was too sick to do the books and my father could not tell the difference between revenue and profit. He still cannot.
That is not an insult. It is a line item. I ran his business for seven years.
Four laundromats across East Atlanta. Thirty-one employees at peak. Annual revenue crossing $900,000.
By the time I left, he had paid me a total of $189,000 across all seven years. When I did the math, and I always do the math, that worked out to roughly $27,000 a year, about $13 an hour if you counted the overtime, which nobody did, because family did not punch a clock. Family did not punch a clock, but family apparently did file lawsuits.
But you need context. Numbers without context are just decoration. So let me go back seven years and approximately $423,000, back to the beginning.
Gerald Price opened his first laundromat on Covington Highway in 2006. I was ten. The place smelled like chlorine and overheated polyester, and the industrial washers shook the concrete floor hard enough to rattle the gumball machine by the entrance.
Fourteen gumballs fell out the first week. I picked them up and put them back. Nobody asked me to.
I just did not like things being out of place. That should have been a warning sign. My father was a big man with a bigger voice.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
