I felt my stomach tighten in a way that had become familiar. “They need it,” I said, hearing the defensiveness already assembled in my own voice. “You know how things are for them right now.”
“I know,” Marcus said, and reached across the table to take my hand. His fingers had developed calluses that had not been there when we first met, from the weekend construction work he had taken on to supplement his regular job. “But things are tight for us too, babe. We have Lily.”
As if she had been waiting for her name to appear in the conversation, our daughter knocked over a tower of blocks in the next room and laughed with a delight so pure it cut through everything. I looked at her through the doorway, four years old and sitting cross-legged on our worn carpet, her dark pigtails coming loose from the elastic I had done that morning. Her pajamas were from the Target clearance rack, bought one size too large so she could grow into them. Everything we purchased for her followed that logic. Everything was calibrated to last a little longer, cost a little less, stretch a little further.
“I’ll pick up extra shifts,” I said, which was what I always said. “Janet asked if anyone could cover the weekend rush.”
Marcus did not argue. He never argued. He knew how deeply the obligation ran in me, how completely my understanding of what it meant to be a daughter had been built around the idea of endless giving. What I did not understand then, or would not let myself understand, was that the obligation had been carefully constructed by people who benefited from it.
My parents, Margaret and Robert Chen, had called two years earlier with a story about financial hardship that landed precisely on the part of me that was most vulnerable to it. My mother’s voice on the phone had been fragile in a way I rarely heard from her, talking about the mortgage, about my father’s reduced hours at the hardware store, about the frightening possibility of losing the house. I had not hesitated. I asked how much they needed and did not question the answer when four hundred dollars a week quietly became five hundred and fifty once they realized I would not push back.
