December came early and hard that year, burying Milwaukee’s west side under a gray crust of snow and ice that made every errand feel like a negotiation with the weather.
In a second-floor apartment above a closed tailor shop, Ana Morales stood in her kitchen counting coins beside a chipped ceramic sugar bowl while the radiator hissed like it had an opinion about poverty.
She was seventy-one, with hands still strong from a lifetime of factory work, and she had spent enough winters stretching money to know exactly how fear sounded. It sounded like silence at breakfast.
It sounded like bills folded twice.
It sounded like Christmas approaching when the pension still had not arrived.
Javier, her husband of forty-eight years, tried to make light of it the way he always did. He sat at the kitchen table rubbing the small of his back through an old wool sweater and telling her they had survived worse.
