And my ex-husband, tired, in his beige-carpeted apartment, looked at his mother and said a sentence I do not think had ever left his mouth before.

“No, Mom,” he said.

“I can’t afford it.”

Evelyn did not speak to him for two weeks.

In the old days, that silence would have worked; it had always worked; it was the lever by which she had operated him his entire life.

Two weeks of a mother’s cold shoulder, and Jason would have found the money somewhere — from his own pocket, or from mine — and apologized for having made her ask twice.