Kiran was spinning the keys to a brand-new truck around one finger.

Not one of them had brought a single dollar toward the bill.

And as they wheeled me away, I heard my sister say to the others, in a bored voice, that they should go get tacos, because appendicitis really wasn’t that serious.

Six oranges.

I keep returning to the oranges, because in their smallness they contained the entire truth of how my family regarded me.

My mother had a quarter of a million dollars of my money — money I had earned, money she had promised to save, money that at that very moment could have paid for the surgery ten times over — and when her son lay bleeding and about to be cut open, she stopped, on the way, and bought six oranges.