I grew up believing my crooked gait was simply the price of bad luck, the way a family with no money absorbs bad luck into its body and carries it.

I never once considered that the therapy had been affordable all along, that the money for it had been sitting in a storefront on Main Street with my stepfather’s and my brother’s names on the deed.

You cannot resent a theft you don’t know happened.

So I didn’t resent it.

I just limped, and called it fate.

Delroy was the one who handled everything, always, and we let him, because that was the arrangement in our house.

He was the man who read the papers and signed the papers and told the women what the papers said.