Deborah was severely anemic, her body worn thin by years of thin meals.
Neither of them had wanted to make a fuss.
Ezra drove his father to every appointment and sat beside his mother through every treatment, and in those quiet waiting rooms he heard the small histories they’d never told him — the winter they sold the television to fill one prescription, the nights they slept under a single blanket, the Christmases they told each other they weren’t hungry so there’d be food left for January.
Each story was a stone he would carry, and he was glad to carry it, because carrying it was the least of what he owed.
There was one afternoon in particular he would never be free of.
He was sitting beside his mother while a nurse ran a slow line of iron into her arm, and to fill the silence she started telling him, almost cheerfully, about a Christmas some years back — the year, she said, that she and his father had discovered you could make a single roasted chicken stretch across four days if you were clever about the soup.