I stood on the porch a while with the balloons straining toward the sky and that word sitting in my ear.

Pressure.

I looked through the window at my own kitchen table, where the week’s receipts were still tucked under the household folder, six hundred and ninety dollars until the next Friday took its share, and I thought about who in this family was under pressure and who was finally comfortable, and about how my father had arranged those two facts in his sentence so that I was somehow on the comfortable side of it.

I carried the balloons inside.