I could tell, from the long silences between his short answers, that the man on the other end was not making it easy.

When he hung up, he had lost his early-shift attendance bonus for the whole week, and the Saturday overtime he had been counting on to cover our bills.

I knew what losing overtime meant in our house, because I had learned to read our budget the way I read everything else.

It meant the electric bill would sit unpaid on the counter for two extra weeks.

It meant cheap canned stew instead of the fresh meat that wasn’t on sale.

It meant my father at the kitchen table late at night with three overdue notices and an old solar calculator and a pencil, long after he thought I was asleep.