Chapter 5

“Thanks for coming, Nicola. I’m so glad you can still make time for your old mom.” She smiled. “I knew you would, because you love me. I love you, too.”

Yes, I felt that way, but the reason I was here had nothing to do with love. I had come to my parents’ house for one reason and one reason only: if I didn’t, my mother would have made my dad take her to the emergency room to see me there instead, and I was sure that they would have shown up unannounced at Detroit Saint Raphael Hospital. Since I no longer worked at that place but hadn’t told anyone in my family, I obviously didn’t want that to happen. So when she’d called, I’d come over even though I was absolutely positive that…

“No, it’s not an infection,” I said after only a cursory glance at her arm. “It’s a mosquito bite, not staph.” We’d had many of these visits, in which I’d also told her that she didn’t have dropsy or bot fly infestation, among other conditions. She was dramatic.

“Are you sure? Because I looked on the internet—”

“Mom, I’m sure. It’s a mosquito bite.” And after she picked up her other hand and casually scratched it, I was sure that she’d already suspected that, too. “Why did you really want me to come over?”

“Besides staphylococcus, I’m worried about Addie and that man,” she said, and we all hated my sister’s boyfriend so I was game to talk about him for a while. My mom was also worried about Sophie and how she might have been living in a pigpen (she probably was), how Grace had no purpose and how was she ever going to find one (it would happen when my parents tossed her out of their house), and how Juliet had just dumped her latest guy and Dad had liked him so much (Dad could go date him, then). But her mind was mostly devoted to concerns about my only brother, Patrick, who was also the only one of us who had moved away. He’d had the chance to marry my former tenant, Liv, but had blown that up and was now floundering.

“He deserves what he gets,” I said, and my mom looked distressed.

“Nicky, don’t say that!” she begged, using the name that only she had adopted and which I hated. It didn’t soften me to her line of thinking.

“Mom, I need to go to work,” I told her, using the same excuse that I always did.

“I thought you worked seven to seven.”

She was right about that, because my shifts at Midtown General were still at night. But the new job I’d gotten at the Presbyterian Hospital of Detroit was different, and I started in the afternoon and was there until one in the morning. “I changed things up,” I explained.

“That’s wonderful! We can all benefit from change,” my mom answered, and got a look that told me a Big Speech was coming.

I tried to head it off. “Mom—”

Too late. “What about you, Nicky? You talk about your sisters’ boyfriends but when are you planning to settle down with someone?”

My heart was beating harder. “I don’t have any plans at all,” I said.

“But you don’t want to wait too long,” she told me, and the speech commenced. “I remember the day you were born, when you looked up at me with your big blue eyes like cornflowers and then you screamed your little head off and your face got redder than your hair. It’s hard to believe that happened thirty years ago. Thirty years, Nicola! You’re a thirty-year-old woman and it’s time for you to do something other than work! I’m not saying that everyone needs the experience of rearing children…”

Did she mean “more experience?” Because I’d already done plenty of child-rearing with my siblings. If I said those words, though, she would deny them, cry, and start an intra-family battle, so I ground my teeth with my mouth shut.

“You need to think about your future besides what you’re putting in the bank!” she continued.

Nothing. I was putting nothing in the bank.

“All you do is go from one shift to the next and I’m so afraid that one day, you’ll wake up as a lonely woman. I’ve watched you shoot down man after man for reasons—”

I couldn’t hold the words back. “I had good reasons!”

“You said that one guy was allergic to rabbits, and maybe someday you would have a cottage with a bunny hutch so you had to dump him. You said that another one had too much back hair—”

“It was like a bathmat! He shed worse than a rabbit!”

“He could have waxed!” my mom countered. “You just walked away. No one is going to be perfect. And all that happened years ago! You haven’t had a boyfriend in a decade.”

“It hasn’t been that long and I’m never going to settle. I’ll never lower my standards for a man or for anything else.”

“Never Nicky,” she said, and shook her head dramatically. “That was what I used to call you. You’d never do this, you’d never do that. You had so many rules to hem yourself in.”

And then I couldn’t hold back anything else, either. “Somebody had to have rules! Somebody had to set standards! You were busy with the next baby but somebody had to take care of the ones you’d already popped out!”

Oh, sugar. Cue the tears and a much bigger fight ensued. “I’m leaving for work!” I ended up saying while she was still mid-sentence. That sentence was her proclaiming that members of families all pitched in to help each other and loved each other too, except maybe me, and if I was trying to blame her—

I shut the side door and hurried through the rain to my car. I quickly texted Addie and JuJu, the siblings that I was still speaking to, and told them not to pick up any calls from Mom.

“What did you do, Nicola!” Juliet demanded, because she and our mother were very tight. I didn’t take the time to explain before I drove off to Presbyterian Hospital, not even when Addie eventually chimed in with questions, and then my phone blew up with a lot of name-calling in French because Mom had gotten ahold of Brenna and must have bothered her a lot. Sophie had our mother permanently muted, as far as I knew, and lucky Grace could never hold on to a phone long enough to check her messages.

I raced over to my new job, wanting to get there early and continue to figure out the lay of the land. Patients were patients and illnesses and injuries were the same, but every hospital ran a little differently. Besides the maze of rooms and hallways, they also all had their quirks of procedure and personalities that I would have to learn. There were new faces to link with names and new relationships to work out among all the staff. I’d already been invited out for drinks, exactly the camaraderie that I wanted to avoid in my work life. I was there to do a job, not to make friends.

Although…if I’d had an ally or two before I’d lost my position at Detroit Saint Raphael, then I would have had extra ears to report on the plot against me. One of my “friends” would probably have mentioned, “Hey Nicola, the nurse manager is hot after your butt because she and her little pal Cleo have it in for you, since Cleo is incompetent and you keep showing her up. Better watch out, or they may accumulate enough crap about you to instigate a dismissal.” And then I could have acted accordingly, instead of being blindsided. Instead, it had seemed like everyone had been aware of my impending downfall but me.

Maybe it was time to reconsider my approach, I thought. I could be nicer to my colleagues, butter them up a little, so that they would be on my side in any potential conflicts with management. They wouldn’t be running around reporting on me, either, if they thought that we were “friends.” It wasn’t like I’d been an outcast in my former life, so I knew that I had social skills buried somewhere. I hadn’t ever been part of the cool crowd but I’d had connections and I hadn’t minded people back then, either. I’d attended parties and games with big groups of them. Over the years, I’d withdrawn a lot, but I’d gone out in college and with my colleagues when I’d first started at Detroit Saint Raphael. I could be like that again. Couldn’t I?

When I got home early the next morning, I showered (four minutes) and then spent a little time writing in my journal about how the beginning of Operation Fake Friend had gone at Presbyterian Hospital—pretty successfully, I thought. I’d especially “connected” with two other nurses, Jamila and Cora, and I wrote about them and the approaches I’d tried. Then, as I reread what I’d written and considered how I’d made friends before, I went to my storage room and dug out some of my journals from high school in order to study my former techniques. Holy Mary, there was a lot of embarrassing stuff in there and it seemed as if I’d mostly been an idiot, but there was also an overriding sense about my former life that seemed to project through the pages. I fell asleep with an old journal next to me, remembering those days.

I dreamed about the past and when I opened my eyes later that morning, I identified the feeling I’d picked up on in those decade-old entries: it was happiness. I’d enjoyed myself. I’d been having fun. I hadn’t attended my prom and I’d been really busy, working at a grocery store and still taking care of Brenna and Grace while staying on top of studying, cheer, and student government. But despite all those tasks and chores, I’d liked my life a lot.

How had I accomplished all of that? Because right now, only working at two jobs, I felt about ready to fall into dust. I made my way downstairs, thinking I would get something to eat, but then I sat on the couch for just a minute.

“Nicola, do you want some dinner? Do you have to go to work?” A hand patted my shoulder and that made me jerk awake again. I lurched out of a sleep so deep that I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach as I opened my eyes.

“What?” I gasped. What was happening? “Dinner? What time is it?”

Jude stood next to the couch and I could see that the light had changed, slanting in a way that meant it was late afternoon. “It’s six,” he said, “and I just got home. I’ve been trying to wake you up for a while.”

“I’m up now. I’m fine.”

“Are you?” He sounded doubtful.

“It’s just hard to get into a new schedule,” I said. It was hard to get home at seven in the morning and then go back in that afternoon, which I’d done the day before. Or had it been the day before that? Or was it today? I pressed on my stomach, trying to make it stop roiling. “Did you need something?”

“I thought you might want dinner before you left,” he said, speaking slowly.

I put my feet onto the floor and started to get up, and then I sat back down. “Just another minute,” I told him.

“It’s a lot to work all those hours and then keep running all your errands.”

It was true that I had been going over to Eddie’s a lot more since I’d started thinking about how lonely he was. Although he would have denied it, he needed the company.

“You’re hardly ever home,” Jude continued.

“That’s good for you. I would have been happy if my sisters and brother had gotten out of the house sometimes. Isn’t it nice to be alone?” But I thought of when Jude was gone at night and I was there by myself, how I lay awake and listened for him.

“I don’t mind when we’re here together,” he answered. “Remember how I told you I always wanted siblings? I like having people around, as long as they’re not doing things like using my toothbrush.”

I glanced up at him suspiciously.

“No, I’m really not using yours. I swear.” He sat down next to me and leaned back, as if he was tired as well.

“Long day?”

“Yep, but a good one. I got a commission for a dining room table and eight chairs.” His lips turned up a little. “It’s just a start.”

“But that’s really a great start,” I said. “That’s amazing news for you.”

He nodded. “It is. I’m trying to play it cool right now.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“You take everything in stride,” he told me. “You lost your job, and you got up the next day and started looking for a new one. You live by yourself and you take care of everything—”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I’m barely getting by. I know there are so many things I need to fix and upgrade and it drives me crazy that I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I can’t afford it,” I said bluntly. It must have been my half-awake state that was allowing me to be so free with information, but I changed the subject before I could blabber out any more. “What will the table and chairs look like?”

He showed me the designs he’d started in the little, hardcover book that he carried in his back pocket. He always had it, just like how I brought a journal in my purse, except he mostly drew in his. He made sketches for furniture but also of things he’d seen and admired, like a mural or an interesting cloud or whatever else caught his eye. I looked at his careful drawings and admired them a lot. “Those will be beautiful pieces.”

“Thank you. It feels nice,” he told me, and now his smile wasn’t so little. It was like he was shining a spotlight of happiness right onto me and despite any lingering nausea, I smiled back at him. I felt so proud, just like when JuJu’s relay had won at a swim meet or when one of Sophie’s articles had been published in a real Detroit newspaper and not just the little high school one that she usually wrote for.

“Congratulations,” I told him. “I’m very happy for you.” I hoped that it was the start of new, wonderful things for him—and the truth was that you never knew how life could go, but I really hoped it.

After a moment of grinning at each other, we went in to eat the food he’d prepared out of his own stash of groceries, again. He told me more about his commission and the people he’d be making the furniture for but then I had to run to get myself ready and get out of the door. “Have a good night,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I didn’t think he would, because I was pretty sure that tomorrow—today?—I was going back in at 1300 at…which hospital? Was that the right time? I opened the functioning garage as I tried to puzzle through those questions and when I started the car, I got very bad news. Something under the hood made a horrible noise and the whole body shook so hard that I was afraid pieces might fall off. I quickly turned it off and sat in horrified shock. What was wrong with it? Was it going to explode?

The engine had been loud enough that the neighbor kids ran over (without looking both ways as they crossed) and now stood in my driveway, staring. It had also summoned Jude from the house, and he approached pretty fast. “What was that noise?” Tamara asked me as I got out and backed away. As the younger sibling, she had less concern for her safety and walked even closer to my engine. “Was it going to blow up?” Finally, Michael did his big brother duty and tugged her a few steps from the danger zone.

“Something doesn’t sound right,” Jude commented. He wiped off wet hands on his jeans, because I’d left him with all the dishes. “When did that start?”

“I noticed it shaking a little earlier but it stopped. It didn’t make that noise, nothing like that. What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know too much about cars, but Sergio does. I can give him a call.”

I checked the time on my phone. I was going to be late to work for sure. “Sugar!”

“What?” Michael asked curiously. “Why did you say that?”

“It’s her swear,” his sister told him. “Remember what he said?” And she pointed to my housemate.

“Come on and I’ll drive you to the hospital,” Jude said to me and to the kids he added that he’d see them later. I hurried to his car, which was about as old as mine but a lot messier inside and dirtier on the outside. I kept mine up pretty carefully—except the things that I’d done clearly hadn’t been enough, because now it was about to burst into flames. The kids both waved to us and Jude rolled down the window and reminded them to be careful about crossing the street.

“How did they know about sugar?” I asked as I watched them incautiously run home without checking for cars.

“You mean, how you say that instead of swearing? When Cal kept dropping F bombs in front of them while we were working on the garage door, I suggested that he use ‘sugar’ and ‘holy Mary’ like you do. The kids asked me more questions about you. They said they’ve lived across the street for a while, but that you don’t know each other.”

“No, I don’t know them. I just met their mom the other day.”

“Shannon,” he said, and then came to an abrupt stop at a red. “I thought we were going to make that one.”

I drove carefully, but Jude did not. Well, he was much better at staying in one lane than my sister Grace, who had been impossible to teach, and he went a lot slower than Patrick, who drove like he was being pursued by demons. He just wasn’t quite as careful as I was, but I also understood why he was pressing the accelerator to keep that pace. It was because (in between worrying about my car), I kept saying things like, “I can’t be late!” and “What if I’m fired from another job? What would I do?”

Finally he interrupted my doom spiral. “Nicola, how many times have you been late to work?”

“This month or this year?”

“Ever,” he answered. “When have you ever been late? Wait, let me guess: I bet you never have. Is that right?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I never have. Never Nicola.”

“What does that mean?” He took a corner faster than I did (yet still slower than my brother) and I grabbed the door and held on.

“It’s something my mom said to me…” Had that been yesterday? Time seemed to have skipped around. “She thinks that I’m always saying ‘never’ to everything and I’m always making up rules and throwing up restrictions. But I told her that it’s just because someone had to take charge of those kids.”

“Huh?”

I tried to explain. “Brenna says that I only took care of them because I like to complain, and Sophie believes that I forced it onto myself, that I didn’t have to take on so much responsibility for my siblings and that everyone would have been fine even if I hadn’t stepped in. But they’re wrong. Brenna doesn’t get how much work it was and Sophie was always running off to the library or to take an extra class or study more, so she doesn’t understand, either. None of them really do, especially my mom. If I didn’t make breakfast, no one would have. If I didn’t take them to the park to play, no one would have. I forced Soph to help me make the lunches and she complained and complained, but how would they have done in school if they’d been hungry?”

“You having to do all those things—you doing them instead of your mom and dad, it’s wrong. It’s neglect,” Jude stated flatly, and I remembered talking about that same topic with my neighbor Shannon. “What the hell is wrong with your parents?”

“My dad works a lot, more than anyone I know.”

“More than you do?”

“More than I do,” I confirmed. “He’s also crazy about my mom but he doesn’t understand her at all. He never could seem to get that of course she’s not the kind of person who could deal with delegation, discipline, and time management, and of course you need all of those things to have a big family. And love,” I acknowledged, “which my mother really has a lot of. I know how much she loves us all but she was incapable of taking care of us. So I did, because I couldn’t stand to see my little sisters fighting over a slice of bread or walking around with their hair in knots.”

“And your dad was too busy to notice the problems?”

“Busy and also purposefully blind,” I admitted. “I love him a lot, too, but all he wants is to make Mom happy. He overlooked a lot of what she did and what she didn’t do and when he did notice, it only confused him. He would say, ‘Why, Jacqueline?’ and then cut out.”

“He cut out on seven kids?”

“He didn’t leave us or stop paying for things, but he would go out to the garage or go to the office so he wouldn’t see whatever was going on. He’s very logical and she doesn’t make sense to him, because he would never behave how she does. He chose to ignore everything that was confusing to him.”

“That was great for you guys.”

“It’s not great for anyone. They have nothing at all in common so they’re a very weird couple, and I don’t understand how they’ve been together for so long. In my opinion, they should never have gotten married in the first place.” There I went again with “never.”

“Did I already quote that thing about all shitty families being different in their shitty ways?”

“Yes, and I looked it up and found out that it’s about unhappy families, and it’s the first line of Anna Karenina. It’s a smart take.”

“Yeah, I guess that Tolstoy wasn’t a dummy. My family was also unhappy and shitty but completely different from yours.”

“How?” I asked, watching him across the car.

“Your parents love each other, but mine hated each other. That’s one difference.”

“Why’d they stay married?”

“Money,” he stated. “Jonathan, my dad, comes from a wealthy family, but he didn’t get any of it. His hope was always that someone was going to die and leave them something, and that was what Tiffany wanted, too. My mom,” he explained. “The fantasy that they might get rich again kept them both going. She wanted her share so she stuck around, and he didn’t want a divorce because then he would have owed her alimony out of that mythical pot of gold. I used to hear them fight, daring the other one to leave.”

“Did they ever get an inheritance?”

“Hell, no. They died before the family patriarch did, so they didn’t get jack squat and they made each other miserable the whole time that they were waiting for it. They also made me miserable. I don’t think they noticed that I was around, and unfortunately, I didn’t have a big sister like you.”

“Were they like my mom? She has this magical belief that kids raise themselves without parents intervening too much.”

“Maybe it was magical thinking. They’d both grown up with nannies and housekeepers and maybe they somehow thought that those people also existed in our household, so that there would be somebody else to take care of me. Most likely, they were so wrapped up in their own problems that they never much cared. My mom was depressed and lonely and my dad was an alcoholic, something I recognized as I got older. And I swore that I wouldn’t ever be that guy. I didn’t drink at all until I was in my twenties, and I always kept it under control.”

“Why did you start drinking too much?”

We drove for a little while and I watched Jude as we did. It seemed like he was coming up with a satisfactory answer, rather than answering immediately with the truth. It was something I’d witnessed in many patients who didn’t want to admit to something.

“Some sad shit happened and I couldn’t cope,” he finally said. “A lot of these months of sobriety have been me figuring out how to deal with life. Before I started drinking too much, I ignored the bad stuff and acted as if it wasn’t even there, or that it wasn’t bad at all. Then the alcoholism was me escaping from a reality that I couldn’t face. I can’t do either of those things, not anymore. Those strategies don’t work.”

“But sometimes you have to leave problems in the past. You have to forget them,” I answered. “If you keep rehashing endlessly, then you can’t go ahead with your future. You have to move on.”

“Ignoring what upset or scared me was not a solution, and neither was dousing my brain in booze.” He glanced across the car, meeting my eyes briefly. “Do you do that? Did you have to forget something in order to move on?”

“Me? No,” I said quickly. “No, I’m talking about my sister, Sophie. She had a crazy romance with a man from a Caribbean island, and she went down there to live with him. They had plans to get married and everything but it totally fell to pieces. And so did she, and even though it all happened years ago, she can’t pick those pieces back up. She just sits in her pigpen house and never sees the light of day.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I guess, but she’s had the opportunity to move on. She’s had so many opportunities to leave it behind and keep going,” I explained, “and she can’t. She only wallows.”

“I’m sorry that happened. I hope she’ll be able to come out of it soon.”

“How did you fix it for yourself?” I asked him. “How did you make things ok so that you don’t need to drink anymore?”

“I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t make things ok, and I don’t think they ever will be.” And at that moment, he pulled up in front of Midtown General. “We made it in time,” he announced, and then waited. When I didn’t immediately move to get out of the car, he added, “I’m not supposed to park here.”

“Ok.” But I still didn’t go anywhere. “Yes, ok. I’m getting out,” I assured him. “Thank you for driving me.”

“No problem, and I’ll see you at seven tomorrow morning.”

“No, I can take a—”

“I’ll meet you right by the visitors’ lot so I don’t block this entrance. Give me your keys.”

“What?” But I did what he said, I just handed them right over.

“I’ll see if Serge can take a look at your car,” he explained. “Have a good shift and I’ll see you in twelve hours.”

I did finally move myself from his front seat. Then I stood there and watched him wave to me before he drove off. Then I still stood there, watching his path away from the emergency entrance in his dirty car. I should wash it for him, I decided. I would do that tomorrow between my shifts. Was it tomorrow that I started at one PM? Was today Tuesday? I had no idea.

When I finally walked inside, both the shuttle bus driver and the security guard were grinning. The driver had apparently wrenched his eyes off his phone for long enough to see that I’d been dropped off today instead of riding the bus that he was supposed to be chauffeuring from the employee lot, the one located in Ohio.

“Who was that, Nicola?” he asked me.

This guy knew my name? “A friend,” I answered.

“What a smile,” the security guard squeaked out. Yes, her voice was high and she reached only about four foot ten, but I’d seen the woman in action and she was brutal when she needed to be. “He’s a looker, isn’t he?”

I glanced over my shoulder, as if I could have seen Jude there. “He really is,” I agreed, and both of them laughed.

“Look at you blushing! That’s cute,” the guard said.

“He’s only my housemate,” I defended myself. “That’s all.”

“I thought you said he was a friend.” The guard nudged the bus driver, and he laughed again.

“He’s a friend, too,” I said confusedly, but then I turned and walked down the hallway. Whatever they were trying to insinuate, it was wrong.

I would have thought that was the end of the discussion, but of course, I worked in the emergency department. There was never enough drama with the patients, right? So everyone was interested in the guy who had dropped me off, and no one was satisfied with my explanation that he was my housemate, he was just a friend, I’d had car trouble, and there was nothing more interesting to relate about it.

“Sure,” one of the techs noted, “but this is more than I’ve heard you say in the entire time that I’ve known you, besides when you tell us how to do our jobs.”

“She’s bossy as crap but she knows what she’s talking about,” another nurse said, and I turned to her in surprise.

“Thank you,” I told her and she, in turn, seemed amazed. “Haven’t I ever said thank you before?” I asked, joking. It was supposed to have been a joke, anyway, but then all of them only shrugged as if maybe I hadn’t yet used that phrase with them.

It was just a strange day with everything going…not wrong, but odd. Like I never had car trouble, and I never had to get rides. I never stopped to chat with the security guard, although she was chatty with everyone else in the department. I never talked to my colleagues about anything that didn’t relate to our work, unless they were discussing something about which I had an opinion, like nutrition or cleaning. Or once, I had told Carla that no, I didn’t care for that color of bronzer because it had turned her into a tangerine. She hadn’t been asking for my thoughts, but I had been correct anyway. And once, I had shared my view to Antonia that people who wore red rubber shoes with holes in them might have been better off working at a circus in the clown department rather than as a nurse in our emergency department. She hadn’t worn those red shoes again.

So maybe I had talked to them at times, but it was different from the conversations we were having today. It dawned on me that it might not have been too late to pull an Operation Fake Friend at this hospital just like I was doing at my new job at Presbyterian. It certainly wouldn’t have hurt to hear more of the management gossip that I had never listened to before. And if I was steamrolled again like I had been at my former job, it would help my case if I’d already swayed my coworkers here at MGMC onto my side.

So I worked up a little charm offensive and it was almost unbelievable how well it went over! Almost everyone was falling for it, from the paramedics to the doctors, from the techs to the nurses and even the cranky janitor—

My phone actually rang, which it hardly ever did unless there was a true emergency in my personal life or it was my sister Addie, but she would never have called to say hi at three in the morning. And I saw that it was Eddie, and my heart almost stopped.

“Nicola! Nicola!” he was shouting into the phone as I stepped into a supply closet.

“Calm down and speak normally,” I ordered. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“My damn house got broken into again,” he said.

“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” Because the last time this had happened, he’d been pushed out of his wheelchair and then hit in the face.

“They kicked down the door and broke it, broke the wood and the damn lock. They took the TV you got me. Tried to get my gun.”

“What gun?”

“Damn cops are here and bothering me,” he continued. “Come over and get them out.”

“Eddie, I can’t. I’m at work. I can’t leave mid-shift and anyway, my car is making an awful noise—”

“Did you say no? You’re not coming?”

“I can’t,” I told him again. “I will tomorrow.” I could get a ride there, but not from Jude. “What else did they take? Your medicine?”

“My pills and my government check.”

“Well, they won’t be able to cash—”

“I cashed it,” he shouted. “They took my damn money.”

“Why would you have cashed it?” I asked, my voice also rising. “We talked about you depositing your checks so you wouldn’t have money loose in your house for exactly this reason!”

“Fuck you!” he told me, and then I heard other people speaking in the background. “The cops want to talk to me. Keep your ass away because I don’t want to see you again.”

“I’m coming tomorrow,” I told him. “I’m coming tomorrow and we’ll figure out what to do about your money. I have some that I can give you so you don’t have to worry. Ok? This will be ok.”

“All right.” His tone softened and quieted. “You know I was yelling because I was upset.”

“I know. You don’t have to be and you don’t have to worry.”

I would do that for the both of us.