My mother-in-law smokes a cigarette on the stoop every afternoon at four o’clock. When she finishes, she comes inside to sit at the dining table and drink her cup of coffee, then tells me, “You want a piece of advice? Teach him how to save.”

Every day it’s the same. Her brown eyes starting to cloud from the cataracts. The way she fixes them on me. “If you don’t save,” she says, “you’ll have nothing.”

Sometimes she chews a piece of cinnamon gum. Other times she sucks on a butterscotch candy. Today, she dips her fingers into the candy bowl but there is nothing left—not gum nor butterscotch—and so she runs her tongue along her teeth.

“My husband, he never learned how to save,” she continues. “He had enough to buy a house, once. And I told him, I said, ‘let’s use it for a down payment.’ Even took him to see a nice little place in the countryside, not much but it had everything a person could need. But he came up with every excuse not to buy it.”

I’ve heard the story before, but I raise my eyebrows anyway.

“He was content to stay wherever it was we were—always was that way. Never wanted to get ahead, to make more for himself. As long as he could drink beer and play pool. But the years go by, see?” She leans forward, making sure I’m listening. “You don’t realize it, but they go by and they go by, until one day you look back and think, what have I got to show for it? Nothing.” A lip twitch. A glance out the window. “Nothing.”

When her husband comes home, he tells her to make him a coffee and she does. Then he stretches out on the couch and falls asleep, his snores like distant thunder.

I help my mother-in-law cook dinner—spaghetti with vodka sauce—and the smell of garlic fills the apartment. When it’s time to add the vodka, she pours a little into two shot glasses and hands one to me. “Cheers,” she says with a wink, and we down them together. It’s enough to burn our chests and make us giggle, and we’re flushed by the time the food is ready.

My husband gets home just as we’re sitting down to eat. He’s sweaty from work, but his gaze is soft and he thanks his mother sincerely when she jumps up to prepare him a plate. And as he eats, he tells us stories from his day: a coworker made a fool of himself, a client said something funny. The stories make us laugh, eyes shining. Then he says, “Look what I brought back for you guys,” and pulls out three bottles of fancy Italian wine from his backpack. The labels are artsy and his mother spends a while looking at them, bottle held up to her face.

I get out the wine glasses and we drink without toasting. We all agree the wine tastes very good, very good, indeed, and now it's my father-in-law who’s telling the stories, and we go on laughing. I think it feels good to laugh. I think we are all a little desperate for it, so we sip our wine faster and ever-faster—it’s like the laughter is trapped in the bottle, somehow, and we are setting it free. And every once in a while, I see my mother-in-law’s fingers stray to the candy dish, grasping for something that isn’t there.