But she did.

The coffee can had been Nia’s idea, which is the part that still catches in my throat.

I had meant to save quietly, the way I do most things, without making a ceremony of it.

But Nia had overheard me on the phone with the airline one night, pricing the seats, and the next morning she came into the kitchen with an empty coffee can she had washed out herself and a marker, and she wrote those three words on the side in the careful, wobbling capitals of a six-year-old, and she set it on top of the refrigerator where she could not even reach it. Mama’s Beach Fund. From then on it was a thing we did together.

On Fridays she would ask, in a small serious voice, whether it was a twenty-dollar week or a two-dollar week, and either way she would climb up on a chair and I would lift her the rest of the way so she could drop the money in, and she would shake the can and listen to it and tell me how close she thought we were getting.

She had no real idea how much a plane ticket cost.