I want to be clear about that, because for thirty-four years my answer to my son had always been money. I gave him the name of a debt counsellor and I told him I would sit with him at the first appointment, and he came, and he has been every month since.

They sold the house in the summer. He did not ask my permission and he did not need it. Marisol left in September.

He rents in Astoria now and works two jobs and has not asked me for anything in two years. He comes up on the train once a month. Last time he brought a chisel and fixed the wobble in Ambrose’s table, which came north with me and sits in the condo kitchen with the initials still underneath.

I make my coffee in the drip machine. It takes four minutes and I like all four of them.

They handed me a bill for a room in a house I had carried on my own back for three decades, and I understood at last that I had taught them to see me as infrastructure. A woman is not a utility. The morning I stopped paying for a place at my own table was the morning I finally had one.