By then, I was already a registered nurse. I had studied at night carrying books to the hospital, stealing hours from the sleep my body desperately needed. My salary went up from $5 an hour to $9, then to $12. At forty years old, I was earning $15 per hour and working sixty hours a week—nine hundred a month that went to food, utilities, Faith’s private high school because I wanted her to have what I never did.
She never went hungry. She never wore secondhand clothes. She never had to choose between new notebooks or new shoes. I made sure of that, even if it meant my own shoes had holes in the soles and my nurse’s uniform was mended in places no one saw.
When Faith turned eighteen and announced that she was going to marry Grant—an insurance salesman she had just met—I tried to reason with her.
“Wait, daughter. Finish a degree first. Have something of your own before you tie yourself to someone.”
But she was in love, or what an eighteen-year-old girl thinks is love. And there was no way to convince her.
I paid for the wedding—$3,000 I had saved to fix the roof of the house, which leaked every time it rained hard. But she was my only daughter, and I wanted to see her happy, so I spent every cent on a white dress, a decorated reception hall, and a meal for one hundred twenty guests.
Grant turned out to be exactly what he seemed: a mediocre man with big dreams and little capacity. He sold insurance when there were clients, and when he didn’t—which was most of the time—he lived off Faith’s salary. Faith had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dental clinic.
They had two children, my grandchildren, whom I loved from the moment they were born. But raising two children on a single salary was impossible. So I helped. Always helped.
Fifty dollars here. One hundred there. I paid for school supplies, uniforms, doctor’s visits when they got sick. Faith never said thank you. She simply held out her hand, and I filled the void with bills that represented hours of my life I would never get back.
