vel, thirty-eight thousand dollars a year. I helped first-generation students navigate financial aid. I understood them in a particular and specific way.
In 2015, I began sending my parents four hundred dollars every month. They called it help with bills. I understood it as something closer to a tithe, the regular payment a child makes for the privilege of having made it without her parents and needing them to forgive her for it. I never missed a payment, not even in the winter of 2018 when my heat was shut off because I could not afford both the utilities and my loan payment in the same month. The four hundred dollars left my account on the first of every month for ten years. They never said thank you. It was simply expected, the way certain obligations become invisible when they are never acknowledged.
I met Jaime in the fall of 2022 at a community book club. He taught English at the local high school
