But she is going to carry it, and I have stopped trying to take it off her, because I have learned something about people who do the right thing in a compromised situation, which is that they do not experience it as the right thing.

They experience it as the least bad thing they could get away with, and that stays.

What I did instead was write to her nursing school.

They have an award.

It is small and it is given once a year and it has a citation attached, and I wrote three pages, and in the April of that year Bernadette Kaur was given it in front of about two hundred people, and she did not know I had anything to do with it until she opened the program and saw, in the citation, a sentence about a cardboard box.

She called me that night from a parking lot and was extremely angry with me for about ninety seconds and then was not.