And the whole while, in a bank six blocks from my house, my mother had been running a slow, patient river of restitution toward a daughter who didn’t know to expect it.

I sat there and felt something I can only describe as vertigo — the ground of my own life tilting as a truer floor showed up underneath it.

“The cash in the tin,” Mrs.

Wooten said gently, “wasn’t the settlement.

That was separate.

That was your mother’s own money — her own apology, for not stopping them sooner.

She wanted you to have something in your hands the same day you learned the truth, so it wouldn’t only be a number on a bank statement.” I thought of all those cracked rubber bands, all those soft gray bills, and I understood how long a woman would have to save, a little at a time, to gather eighteen thousand dollars in a flour tin.

Chapter 11 — A Little at a Time