If the car needs a repair this month, what comes out of the budget to pay for it, the groceries or the textbooks.
People who have never lived close to the edge do not understand that being poor is not just having less money; it is a kind of full-time unpaid job, a ceaseless mental labor of triage and anxiety that runs underneath everything else you do.
I did that arithmetic in my sleep.
I did it while I smiled at tables and carried trays and took my exams.
And the number at the center of all of it, the number that could tip the whole delicate balance one way or the other in a single night, was almost always something close to four hundred dollars.
That was the size of the wave that could capsize us.
I lived my life with one eye always on the water, watching for it.
Chapter 2 — All Kinds of People
When you wait tables long enough, you meet every kind of person there is, and you learn to read them fast, because your livelihood depends on it.
Some customers are absolute sweethearts, the kind who look you in the eye and thank you by name and tip like they remember what it is to work for a living.
