“Every month it’s in my account by the fifth.

Today my phone is silent.

Are you pocketing it now?

You think because you earn a little you can climb up on your mother-in-law’s head and call yourself queen?”

I stood there and let myself see it clearly, maybe for the first time.

Fifteen hundred dollars a month — a full paycheck for a lot of working people — and not one cent of it for anything she needed.