I knew that, yet I couldn’t help but recall that horse-shaped piggy bank. I would have liked to have told Mother that I had never thought of taking advantage of her or the three young ones. If I had taken the five-baht note to play cards with my friends at the back of the market, it was because I thought it would be a way out of the situation we faced. I never intended to make Mother grieve; I had only forgotten to think carefully enough, that some solutions may make a bad situation worse.