I thought about that. About the Tuesday night when I stood at that stove counting chicken pieces and arguing with the math and almost said you can’t just bring people home without asking. About the way the math had looked impossible and then turned out, somehow, to be manageable.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I would have done the same. But she hadn’t waited to find out. She had just done it.
That was not something I had taught her. That was something she had figured out herself, in a gym class, watching a girl sit down on the floor because she had run out of fuel, and deciding that she was not going to file it under someone else’s problem.
I had been so busy worrying about enough — enough food, enough money, enough of everything — that I had almost missed the lesson my own daughter was living out in front of me.
