In Florence’s memory, they had not been served by me for twelve years.

They had taken care of me.

They had sheltered a woman who’d have been lost without them, and I owed them a debt for the shelter.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t worked on me for so long.

Because I had half-believed it too, once — had genuinely felt, at times, that I was lucky they kept me around, that my cooking and driving and managing were barely enough to justify the roof over my head.

That is the final trick of it, the one that takes the longest to see: they do not only take your labor for free.