A venue manager named Ms. Ferrante with a clipboard.
My mother, Eileen, at the corner table, in the good cardigan.
And my sister Kendra, who slow-clapped from beside the gift table.
« Honestly, Jill, you should thank him, » she said.
« He made this boring little party memorable. »
I am Jill Hartigan, forty-one years old, a divorced mother and owner of a small bookkeeping firm above a bakery on Fenwick Street.
I do the books for thirty-one small businesses in Harbor Heights.
I catch a missed decimal from across a room.
For six years, I had been paying the tuition for Kendra’s three children at St. Ambrose Academy.
Five thousand three hundred fifty dollars every month, quietly, because Kendra always had a crisis and I was always « the responsible one. »
