The Fourth Daughter

And look what the last one cost him."Ruthie Cathcart was five years old when she heard that sentence, from under a table, at her mother's funeral. She did not know what it meant. She spent the next forty-five years finding out. She was the fourth attempt at a son in a house that wanted one, and the last. Her mother got sick two years after she was born and died three years after that. Nobody in that family ever said either of those things to her face - which is precisely why she could never argue with them.
So she began keeping an account of what she cost. She kept it for forty-five years: through a farm in South Carolina where nobody ever spoke softly to her, through a service entrance in Manhattan at seventeen, through seven years with a man who paid for her education and never once asked her a question he did not already have the answer to. Through three good men she took apart with a magnifying glass.
Through a bar exam she was never eligible to sit and believed for eight years that she had failed. And through the afternoon when her seven-year-old daughter packed a bag to run away - with two changes of her little brother's clothes, folded, and forty dollars from the laundry jar, and a note that said I took 40. I will pay it back. The debt was never real. It took her a lifetime to stop paying it.