I could have gone to days in 2013.

There was a slot.

It paid four thousand dollars a year less and it would have meant losing the shift differential and taking on a childcare cost for the after-school hours, and I ran the numbers on a legal pad and the numbers said no.

The numbers did say no.

I have re-run them since, at forty-nine, with a therapist watching, and the numbers still say no, and I was not wrong.

And I also did not want to be in that apartment at seven o’clock at night with six children and no other adult, and I knew that about myself in 2013 and I did not put it on the legal pad.