It was cash, and it was work, and it meant Mason and I could eat.

Mason would not let go of my coat.

So I settled him on a flattened piece of dry cardboard beside the grand stone steps of the house they called Estate Number Five, and I wrapped Paige’s threadbare sweater around him, and I began to sweep the ice from a driveway longer than any street I had ever lived on.

I did not know, sweeping that driveway, whose house it was.

If I had known, I do not think my legs would have carried me up it.

But I did not know, and so I swept, and Mason sat on his cardboard in the cold bright morning, and for a little while, with warm soup in him and his mother in sight, he was almost all right.