Not on some single desperate night.

For eleven years.

Eleven years of that small, terrifying theft, over and over, a woman risking a beating or worse from a man she’d already watched steal from her child, all so that someday there’d be something to give back.

And when he finally left and the wallet was gone, she hadn’t stopped.

She’d just switched to her own thin money — the pension check, the Social Security, the ten dollars a grandniece tucked into a birthday card — and kept feeding the tin, dollar by dollar, into her seventies, into her last years, when most people are trying to spend down what little they have and rest.

My mother did not rest.