My Sister Showed Off Her New House—And My Mother Looked At Me

hadn’t built it. Our parents had built it, and she’d been shaped by it just as surely as I had. The difference was that I’d been shaped into someone who saved, and she’d been shaped into someone who spent, and when the spending stopped working, the whole structure came down.

I didn’t respond to the letter. Not yet. Maybe someday Victoria and I would continue reading …