“That’s a little wise.”

“That was thirty percent wise,” Laura said. “Go to bed.”

Chapter 12 — The Bill

In March I sat down to help my mother with her taxes, which I do every year, and I saw a number I was not supposed to see.

Her retirement account has eleven thousand four hundred dollars in it.

She is fifty-four years old.

I sat in her kitchen at the Oak Street Apartments — she is still in that apartment, she has been in that apartment for seventeen years, the one that smelled of stale cigarettes when we moved in and which she has made lovely and which is still a rental — and I understood something that had been sitting in plain sight my entire adult life.