Chapter 1 — Four Hundred Dollars
Have you ever really thought about how the same four hundred dollars can be one person’s forgettable dinner and another person’s whole month, their groceries and their electric bill and the thin margin that keeps the roof over their head?
I think about it all the time, because I live on the second side of that equation.
At the time all of this happened, I was still in school, carrying a full course load and trying to build some kind of future for myself, and I was also helping to support my younger sister, Chloe, whose own future depended on the two of us not going under.
Our mother was gone; she had died a few years before, after an illness that took her far too soon, and losing her had turned our small family of three into a smaller family of two, with me, the older sister, sliding without discussion into the role of the one who held things together.
It was just us.
And the way I kept the whole fragile arrangement standing, the tuition and the rent and the groceries and Chloe’s books, was by waiting tables at an upscale restaurant downtown, the kind of place where a single dinner could cost more than I made in two shifts.
