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“It is not on you.”

“I know where he goes when he’s like that. I should’ve known better than to leave it out.”

“How much?”

“Tess.”

“How much, Grandma?”

“Three-forty.”

Three hundred and forty dollars.

I sit very still on my bed. I look at the closet door, at the sticky note I can’t see from here but know is there. Three-forty is electricity, water, and trash for two months. Three-forty is groceries for a few weeks. She’s seventy-one years old and doesn’t need to deal with this crap anymore.

This is why. This is why I do all of it. Why I sit in a lounge at ten at night with a scale and a roll of tape. Why I know what a pair of Levi’s weighs in ounces. Why I’ve never once kept anything I could sell until a seven-dollar sweater. People think money is money. It isn’t. Money is whether the lights stay on when somebody you love lets you down again. Money is whether the person who took you in has to sit in her kitchen in her coat.

“I’ll send it,” I say.

“You will not.”

“I have it. I’ll tell you what, I’ll call the electric company tomorrow and pay it over the phone. You won’t even have to do anything.”

“Tessa, no.”

I shut my mouth.

“That money,” she says, slow and firm, “is for you to come home. You hear me? You worked for that. You’re not paying my bills because your cousin can’t keep his hands out of a coffee can.”

“Then I’ll make more.”

It comes out of me before I think about it, plain and simple, because it’s the truest thing I know about myself. If something gets taken, I can go and make more. That’s the privilege of what I’m doing.

She’s quiet. Then she sighs, and it sounds like it comes up from the bottom of her.

“You’re too much like me,” she says.

I’m already doing the math. I can’t help it. Three-twelve, plus what’s sold since Monday, which is maybe seventy, which makes three-eighty-two. Minus three-forty. Forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars and five weeks until the fifteenth of December, and a bus ticket, and two presents, and a nice dinner on Christmas that I promised myself in September in handwriting on a sticky note.

I can feel Christmas sliding away from me, a little at a time.

“Have you heard from Mom?” I ask.

I don’t know why I ask. We barely talk about her.

The pause on the other end is only a second long. It’s long enough.

“No, honey,” she says. “Not since the summer.”

“Okay.”

“Tess—”

“It’s okay. I was just asking.”

The last time I talked to my mom was a month after graduation. She called out of nowhere on a Tuesday night, and her voice was clear, clearer than I’d heard it in years, and she asked about college and said she was proud of me and said she’d come see me off. She said it twice. I’ll be there, baby. I’ll be there. I believed her. I don’t know why. I’ve had eighteen years of reasons not to, and I believed her anyway, because some stupid soft part of me never learns.

The bus left at seven-fifteen in the morning. My grandma stood in the parking lot of the station in her good coat and waved until she was too small to see. And I sat by the window with my forehead against the glass and watched the entrance to the lot the entire time we were boarding, every car that turned in, every pair of headlights, until the doors folded shut and the bus pulled out, and the lot got smaller, and nobody else came for me. I was hoping to see her blonde hair and green eyes pull up at the last second so I could give her a final hug before going off to college. I stared at the parking lot, knowing that if she came—and she was high—I would forgive her because at least she had shown up.