And besides, I did not want to go on working, and what else was there? Stephen would sometimes say, “Won’t it be great when I get going and you can quit work and we’ll have babies — three is a good number, don’t you think? — and buy a house and live happily ever after?” He was making fun of it in a way, but underneath he was serious.

We were never really short of money. At Christmas and birthdays our parents would give us small gifts of cash, and Stephen did well and so his parents continued to pay his tuition. We couldn’t do anything extravagant, but we had enough to buy food, pay the rent and occasionally go to a movie. Now and then we would buy a case of beer and have some of Stephen’s friends for an evening, and that was enough.

They were always Stephen’s friends because I still knew no one. In my days I met customers, not people. In a way his friends became mine, and I listened to them talk about university, about courses, about people there. They were kind, but they did not ask about the dress shop. Sometimes, if I had a funny customer or something unusual happened, I would think, “Next time they come over I’ll tell them about this, they’ll enjoy it,” but I never did. The dress shop and what I did there seemed too far away from them to be properly shared. Still, what they talked about was interesting, and a change.

When I turned twenty-one, we became rich, thanks to my grandmother who died when I was thirteen. She was my father’s mother, and an odd, secluded old woman, the family thought. She had money but disliked spending it; a widow, she lived in the home she and her husband had built, and when she died she left the house to my father, her only child, and her money to me, his only child. It was in trust for me until I came of age, but Stephen and I talked about it then and decided it wasn’t mine, not really. It amounted, with accumulated interest, to fifty thousand dollars. It was a fortune.

Stephen suggested we invest it for the three children we would have, and when they were old enough to choose their futures, it would be a gift to help them. Divided among them, he said, it could be more than twenty thousand each.