She was confused by all this talk of buying her a house. She’d lived at 181 Chapman Street for almost fifty years. She’d been poor for the same amount of time. That was the life she knew, and she was more or less content with it. She didn’t understand how her strong, bright boy could bring himself such discouragement trying to change what she had; she didn’t understand why he couldn’t hear her on the rare instances she’d tried to explain it to him.
