My mother does it.

It got me through a miscarriage at twenty-six and it got me through my father-in-law’s cancer scare, and it is, I am aware, its own kind of damage.

At 11:20 that night I opened a blank spreadsheet.

I titled it, because I am who I am, ASSETS AND HISTORY.

And I started at the beginning.

The house on Vernon: purchase price, down payment (fourteen thousand, of which nine had come from my grandmother), every refinance, every payment, the balance.

The duplex on Alder we’d bought in year seven as a rental: purchase price, the loan, the eleven months of rent I had personally collected because the tenant would only text me, the four thousand dollars of repairs I had scheduled and supervised.