Let me tell you what those four years had been, so you understand what I was looking at.

For four years I had worked twelve-hour shifts in a metalworking shop that smelled permanently of scorched steel.

I ate reheated meals out of a shared microwave.

I slept in a rented room with four other men, our bunks close enough to touch, and I sent nearly every dollar I did not absolutely need back home.

The winters up there cracked my lips and split the skin of my knuckles, and I worked through them, because the whole arithmetic of my life in those years was simple: the more I endured, the more I could send, and the more I sent, the better the life that was waiting for me when I finally came home.

Every month I wired between two and three thousand dollars into my mother’s bank account.