By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

PART 1 — THE LAWN

We met over the last pair of gloves.

First week of first year at Keswick, anatomy lab, and there was one box left on the shelf with one pair in it, and we both had a hand on it.

“You took those,” he said.

“I got there first.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It is if I’m the one holding them.”

He laughed, and I have thought about that laugh perhaps four thousand times since.

Teo Vantrease wanted internal medicine. I wanted emergency. He liked plans and I liked momentum. He made me steadier. I made him laugh when he had forgotten how to.

We were studying together by the Friday.

Then his family came apart.

His father lost the business in the November of our first year. His mother’s health went the following spring. Money went from adequate to absent in about seven months in a way that people who have not watched it do not believe.