My wife and I arrive in Paris and check into our hotel on the edges of the 2nd and 9th Arrondissement.

Last week he was a dishwasher who his coworkers called Ricky. Today he’s a day laborer named Eddie, clearing a pair of fallen trees off a new build’s lawn and fixing up a large garden. Rotting plank ripped out, new plank inserted.

It wasn’t yet six o’clock when the mine supervisor of Shannon Hill called the Byrd household and woke Ruth out of a simmering sleep.

 

I am diving for my mother’s last working kidney.