“It is a tribute,” he said, his voice dropping into that defensive register he used whenever he felt cornered by a budget or a schedule. “I wanted to do something that showed we are all together in this.”
I reached out and touched the edge of the plastic, feeling the heat radiating from his arm, the skin already swelling under the seal.
“How much did this cost?” I asked.
He pulled his arm back, his sleeve sliding down to cover the plastic wrap.
“It does not matter,” he said.
“It matters when your first college tuition payment of twelve thousand four hundred dollars is due in nineteen days,” I said, looking at the yellow envelope sitting on the corner of the microwave.
“I did not pay for it,” Dustin said.
He turned toward the sink and began rinsing his hands, keeping his back to me while the water ran loud and cold against the stainless steel.
My mother, Joyce, sat on the sofa in the living room three hours later, her lap filled with a pile of freshly dried white socks that she folded with slow, deliberate movements. She was sixty-four now, and her fingers sometimes stiffened after her afternoon shifts at the bakery, but she refused to let me help with the laundry.
I handed her my phone, the screen showing the photograph I had taken of Dustin’s arm while he was eating his dinner.
Joyce held the phone three inches from her eyes, squinting under the floor lamp before she shook her head and set the device down on the cushion beside her.
“He is eighteen,” she said, her voice soft and old-fashioned, the way she spoke when she was trying to keep her own worries from spilling over. “They do things to their bodies now that we never would have dreamed of, Cara.”
