I remember looking at the estimate without truly processing the numbers at first, because some amounts are so far beyond your reach that your mind stops recognizing them as money.
They become something different entirely, something like a barrier, and all you can think about is the person you love waiting on the other side of it.
I had been raising Owen alone since before he could remember.
His father, Grant Mercer, had left while I was expecting him, saying he was too young to become the kind of man a family needed, and although I spent several years believing maturity might someday bring him back, it never happened.
So I learned to survive without him.
I worked mornings as a home-care aide, managed evening bookkeeping for a small dental office, purchased nearly everything secondhand, and became surprisingly talented at making forty dollars stretch as though it were seventy-five.
Owen rarely complained, partly because he was naturally cheerful and partly because children can accept almost any life as normal when the person raising them makes it feel secure.
But there was no way to budget around that hospital estimate.
