She gave me a piece of advice that I thought, at twenty-six, was needlessly grim — the counsel of a woman from a harder generation who did not trust easily.

“A woman,” Joanne told me, “must always keep enough money to open her own door.

For whenever someone else decides to lock her out.”

I had kept the account mostly out of respect for her, half-embarrassed by it, the way you humor a parent’s superstition.

For eight years it sat there, small and quiet and, I assumed, unnecessary — a little monument to a caution I did not believe I would ever need.

I understand my mother’s advice differently now than I did at twenty-six.