“Are you all right?”
I laughed. It came out wrong. “My husband handed me divorce papers at his graduation, so — no.”
And Idris Kalu’s face changed completely.
He said, “Don’t go home alone.”
“What?”
He looked back toward the lawn and dropped his voice.
“There are things you need to know before you talk to him again.”
PART 2 — EIGHT YEARS
I want to describe those eight years properly, because “she supported him through medical school” is a sentence that hides about seventeen thousand hours.
The first two years I worked at a dental practice on Varden Row from seven-forty to four, and then at a pharmacy counter from five to eleven, four nights a week.
That is a fifteen-hour day with a twenty-minute gap in the middle where I ate in my car.
I did that for twenty-six months.
Then I got the urgent care billing job, which was better money and which I could do partly from home, and I dropped the pharmacy to weekends only. So then it was the dental office all week and billing on Saturdays and Sundays.
