Where I come from, you do not put your family in a stranger’s hands, and you do not ask your wife to fend for herself alone in a half-built house while you are gone for years.

You keep the family together.

The son goes where the work is, and the mother holds the home, and the money flows to the center and is shared out by the one who raised you, because that is how it has always been done and it has always, more or less, worked.

When I put Selina’s name on that account, I was not being careless.

I was doing the most careful, most traditional, most trusting thing a man in my position could do — handing the fruit of my labor to my own mother, the woman who had fed me as a child, on the unspoken understanding that she would now help feed my wife.