was simpler.
I stopped sending money home.
My family stopped being able to see me.
The money is where this story begins.
It isn’t where it ends.
If I’m being exact—and nurses are trained to be exact—it started ten years earlier with an envelope at my nursing-school graduation dinner.
I was twenty-four, the first Ives to finish college. I had paid for my degree with loans and double shifts at a diner.
My mother, Carol, held dinner at our house in Dayton.
Pot roast. A folding table pushed against the
