My mom met her best friend, Karsen Evans, in the secretarial pool of the ITT office in Orange County. Karsen was funny and outgoing, and bore a striking resemblance to Ann-Margret. She married a successful entrepreneur, Charly, who owned a printing business. Karsen and Charly were dear friends to my mom. She stayed with them after she and my dad split.

In their company, as a nine-year-old, I registered several things for the first time:

1. Karsen was the first woman I remember thinking was really “pretty.”
2. I noticed they had nicer things than we did: a big house overlooking the Valley, German cars, fur coats, and fancy guns from Italy. Karsen wore a belt with gold hoops that encased twenty-four $10 Indian Head Gold Eagle coins. Karsen and Charly were something I had never encountered or noticed before. They were “rich.”
3. They also didn’t have kids, and had fun parties where groovy people got drunk. They would dance to a live band whose lead singer Charly knew personally. They were “cool.”

In high school, Charly would take me to lunch at his firm, and I began to get a sense of work and what it meant to make money. I started to connect work with gold coins and groovy people who listened to live music, overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

Charly was ahead of his time. He saw disruption coming and made a bold bet on technology—computers that would replace typesetting. The technology was not practical and required him to change the entire operation of his company at huge costs. Within two years, his firm of thirty years was out of business, and Charly and Karsen were financially ruined. As in many marriages, financial strain spelled doom, and Karsen told Charly she was leaving him.

Soon after, Charly was admitted to the hospital with what was then called a nervous breakdown. The term depression wasn’t yet part of American vocabulary. After being discharged from the hospital, Charly asked Karsen to go the grocery store, as they were out of Häagen-Dazs. Once she left, Charly went into the garage, put shells in an antique rifle, pressed the muzzle to his chest, and pulled the trigger. Four hundred people came to the funeral—he was loved. I remember the juxtaposition of more than a hundred people crying, his three grown sons (from his first marriage) sobbing uncontrollably, and Karsen, wearing thigh-high leather boots, welcoming everyone.

Soon after Charly passed, Karsen had several failed back surgeries and became addicted to opioids. She and my mom remained close. When my mom was sick, Karsen showed up unexpectedly on my mom’s doorstep one day and announced she was there to take care of her best friend. She had driven from San Diego to Las Vegas. I unloaded her canary-yellow Corvette of its contents: two fake Vuitton bags, a Maltese dog, and seven one-liter bottles of Johnnie Walker Red.

When my mom became really ill, Karsen would help her with things I couldn’t—showering, changing. She made Hot Pockets for us every night. She would also seduce thirtysomething maintenance workers (my mom lived on a golf course) and drank a liter of Scotch every three or four days. By this math, I figured Karsen had given my mom a month to live, as that’s when Karsen would run out of Red Label.

After my mom died, Karsen asked if I would look in on her. I called once a month for about six months, and then stopped calling. I got too wrapped up in my own shit to call the woman who had showered my mom when she was dying. So selfish.

I got a call two years later that Karsen had died. Unable to get a ride to pick up her pain meds, she experienced serious withdrawal, and her heart gave out. Her estate attorney informed me I was the sole beneficiary of her estate (using the term generously). Still, more than I deserved. Just like referred pain, this was love for my mom manifesting somewhere else.

I inherited the belt of Gold Eagles and decided to keep them in case shit got real—end-of-the-world stuff. I could hitchhike to Idaho and begin trading gold coins for guns, butter, and a few days in someone’s underground bunker. You never know.

I hid the belt, which is a bad idea, as a third of the things I don’t hide I lose anyway. I hadn’t seen the coins in several years when my close friend Adam asked if I knew there was costume jewelry, a tacky gold belt, in a dresser I had given him. I told him it wasn’t costume and that it was likely worth tens of thousands of dollars. Adam said his thirteen-year-old son had been wearing it to seventh grade every day as a necklace, because it made him look like a rapper. He gave it back to me.

Karsen and Charly Evans were the most impressive people we knew, on top of the world, and they both died alone. Karsen was an addict whose only family or friend was my mom. Charly was too sick to feel the love of his family. I’ve become an addict of sorts as well. Addicted to the affirmation and economic security that comes with professional success. I look at the belt and feel the need to invest in relationships in case they are all I’m left with, and to maintain the perspective that, in the end, that is all we have, and all that matters.