I hated it.
Not because Vernon was homeless. I want to be clear about that.
I hated it because we were poor too, and every plate she carried out back felt like food taken out of my own mouth.
“Maybe if you stopped feeding strangers,” I told her once, when I was fifteen and furious, “we wouldn’t have to live like this.”
My mother, who never raised her voice, exploded.
“Don’t you ever DARE say that to me again.”
I had never seen her like that. There was something behind it I did not understand, something fierce and frightening and bottomless.
So I stopped saying it. But I never stopped thinking it.
There were nights I lay awake doing the math a child should never have to do. Three plates a day, times three hundred and sixty-five days, times all the years I had been alive. An ocean of food, carried out the back door, while I wore the same winter coat two sizes too small for a second year.
