I worked.

I worked in a way that I can only now, looking back, fully see.

Seventy-hour weeks at the store, and then side jobs on top of that — I fixed people’s fences and rehung their doors and cleared their gutters on my days off, anything with a few dollars attached to it.

I got good at making one paycheck do the work of two, and then three.

And there was an arithmetic to it that the girls did not understand until they were much older, and that I never once explained, because a child should not have to carry it.

The arithmetic was this: that there was only so much money, and so it had to be decided, constantly, quietly, who went without.