She went into the back bedroom where baby Walter was asleep and came back holding a small vinyl passbook.

She set the passbook on the table right next to my box of pens.

“There’s twelve hundred dollars in my credit union account,” she said, calling me sweetheart as she tapped the cover.

“Mom, no,” I said.

“That’s your emergency money from thirty years of cleaning houses.”

“I didn’t spend thirty years on my knees scrubbing tile floors to watch Spencer’s mother take everything from my grandson,” she said.

“That money’s for your joint prescriptions,” I said.