The agency had sent me this young woman to clean floors, and in six months of doing it she had come to know my mother — her fears, her comforts, the specific weather of her bad nights — more intimately than I had in thirty-four years of being her son.

I had told myself the distance between us was the natural cost of my responsibilities.

Juliet had just demonstrated, without meaning to, that the distance had been a choice, made daily, by me, and that a stranger with no obligation to my mother at all had simply chosen differently.

I was still absorbing that when the office door opened, and my mother rolled herself inside.

Chapter 6 — You Gave Me Money