Ezoic
“Baking is how I talk to people, Jenna,” she said. “When I don’t have the words. I put it in the cake instead.”
Grandma lives on a very small pension now. Grandpa worked for the city water department for thirty years. She was a school cafeteria cook for twenty-six. Their savings went mostly to Grandpa’s medical bills at the end.
She gets about fourteen hundred dollars a month. She owns the little yellow house, thank God, so she doesn’t pay rent. But there’s property tax. Utilities. Groceries. Car insurance on her old Buick that she only drives to church and the grocery store.
Ezoic
And her medication.
She has a heart condition. Atrial fibrillation. She takes three different pills every day. Two of them are covered by insurance. The third one isn’t. It costs a hundred and eighty dollars a month.
She budgets everything. Every single dollar. She has a little green spiral notebook in her kitchen drawer where she writes down every penny she spends. She clips coupons. She buys day-old bread. She reuses aluminum foil until it falls apart.
