I worked forty hours a week, then fifty, then sixty when overtime was available and I was desperate enough to take it. My feet swelled in my steel-toed work boots until I could barely get them off at the end of my shift. My hands cracked and bled from the industrial cleaning chemicals we used. My lungs filled slowly with cotton fibers and the constant haze of secondhand smoke in the break room, where dozens of workers lit up during every fifteen-minute break, the smoke so thick you could barely see across the room.
The factory paid barely above minimum wage, but it was steady work and they didn’t ask questions and they let you pick up extra shifts if you were willing to destroy your body for a few more dollars.
I started keeping coffee cans in the back of my bedroom closet, hidden behind winter coats and boxes of outgrown baby clothes I couldn’t bring myself to donate. Every payday, after I paid the rent and utilities and bought groceries and diapers, I slid whatever was left into those cans. Some weeks it was twenty dollars. Some weeks it was ten. Some weeks it was five crumpled bills and a handful of coins.
