Chapter 9: Ordinary
Six months after the baseball cake, the event occupied the same mental shelf as any other difficult afternoon that had been survived and filed.
Theo had a school project that required a family tree. He included Drew and her children in the appropriate boxes and did not ask whether the lines should be erased. I helped him letter the names neatly. The document was about biology and basic structure, not about ongoing financial relationships. We turned it in on time. The simplicity of that boundary—what belonged on a school poster versus what belonged in my banking history—felt like progress measured in ordinary units rather than declarations.
My bookkeeping practice absorbed the recovered monthly margin without drama. A modest emergency fund appeared where none had comfortably existed. I replaced Theo’s sneakers when the old pair wore out, this time without the background calculation of what the same money might have covered for someone else’s uniform. The calculation itself had been a form of ongoing labor. Ending it freed more attention than the dollar amount alone suggested.
