“You can,” she said, the same way I’d said it on the sidewalk. “You will. Because I want to tie the knot where the thread began.” She sat back and exhaled like she’d been holding her breath for two weeks. “You bought me shoes. It sounds so small when you say it that way, but it was the first thing I’d been given in years without a ledger attached. I realized later that I left my old life wearing kindness. No one had ever dressed me in that before.”
“What if I… waste it?” I asked, because scarcity rewires your brain in permanent ways.
“You won’t,” she said simply. “You’ll make it multiply.”
I didn’t cash it that day. I propped it against the sugar canister, where it looked indecent, and I walked by it a dozen times like a cat pretending not to be interested. I slept badly, which is how I sleep when joy scares me. In the morning, I made eggs and told Tyler over FaceTime that if I bought an espresso machine I would become unbearable. “You’re already unbearable, Mom,” he said, fond. Jacob sent a meme about checks that would have made my grandmother clutch her pearls and also laugh until she wheezed.
