“Doña Carmen, don’t worry about the money. You can pay me whenever you can.”
She set the spoon down on the plate with a deliberate slowness that suggested the action was costing her something.
Then she looked at me with a strange sadness—the kind of sadness that comes from understanding something deeply about the human condition, about suffering, about the way people leave this world.
“You always talk as if there will still be a ‘later,’” she said quietly.
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
The Routine That Became A Life
Over the following months, my routine became woven into the fabric of her existence, and she slowly became woven into the fabric of mine.
I would bring her fruit when I had a little extra money from one of my other jobs—oranges mostly, sometimes apples when they were on sale at the discount grocery store where I shopped for my own meals. I bought her medicine if I noticed she couldn’t afford it—blood pressure medication, allergy pills, the small items that add up to maintaining life but that she had started to skip in order to stretch her social security check.
