That was all I could afford to see — this week’s rent, this week’s groceries, this Tuesday’s bus fare.

Poverty shortens your horizon until you cannot see past the next crisis, and I had been living inside a horizon that reached only a few days out for so long that I had forgotten there was any other way to live.

And that morning, watching Lucas spread jam on his toast, I realized that I could plan in years now.

In decades.

I could think about his college, and his future, and the man he might become, without the thought curdling instantly into panic about how I would pay for any of it.

Mr.