So when her savings ran out, she had rented the windowless room by the canal.

She took a morning shift at a commercial laundry.

And in the afternoons she walked the alleys with a sack, collecting cardboard and glass and aluminum, and she turned it into the diapers and the medications and the food that had kept my father alive for six months while I sat in board meetings and admired video clips of a garden he had walked in for two days.

Chapter 7 — Forty-Eight Hours