January was colder than usual. She now had two babies to look after, her father and Matthew, but with the help of her aunts, she found time to shop at places like Al’s Dollar Store, looking at thin, coarsely made baby clothes, loose threads hanging from the seams as though somebody in Albania had given up in mid-stitch. Soon she ran out of makeup and merely washed her face each morning, making do with that. She clipped coupons out of the throwaway newspaper, and moneyless weeks passed, seeming like little lifetimes. Paul came home from the hospital and was trying to rehabilitate himself with some exercises the hospital staff had taught him.

One night when the baby and her father were asleep, she took a long bath and thought of her mother’s advice—how she should always remember God, become educated, choose a good man and a good job that would allow her to live comfortably. She wondered what she’d meant by the word comfortably. She knew rich folks who were uncomfortable with everything. Closing her eyes in the tub, she tried to see her mother again, a thin lady who preferred dresses to pants, who moved with delicate patience through life, good-humored and kind, a schoolteacher. What else had she said? Something about nothing wrong with being poor but that poverty sometimes bred a hardness toward others, a suspicion in the blood that colored the way one looked at things. She remembered now. Her mother had sat up with her, talking to her on the porch in the rare coolness of a spring night, before the bugs got bad. She’d said merely that hard work and education got you good food and a good roof for your whole life. It also made people look up to you, which made you look up to yourself. It made her feel strange to realize that she would have to say the same things to Matthew one day.

What bothered Colette in the stores were the glances from people who knew her, expressions of pity for a tragic figure, the smart, pretty girl who went west to make her fortune, only to come back busted, divorced, and living at home. It embarrassed her to shop for anything, because she could afford nothing of the best anymore. It also embarrassed her to realize how much she liked money, thought about money, yearned after shiny things in general. She began to feel guilty when she wanted things. When she thought of the Mercedes, she winced at the sum she’d wasted and wondered whether she could ever handle good fortune again. She hoped she’d achieved a sort of wisdom by having it and then losing it.