The grades slip even a little, and the job is done.” “Deal,” he said, and stuck out his small chapped hand for me to shake, so solemnly that I had to fight not to laugh and not to cry, both at once.

I shook it.

I did not know, shaking my thirteen-year-old’s hand over a dishwashing job, that I had just agreed to something far larger and far more heartbreaking than either of us understood in that moment.

I thought I was letting my son buy a bicycle.

I was doing nothing of the kind.

It is strange, and a little painful, to look back now at that handshake in the kitchen, at how pleased I was with the whole arrangement, at how neatly it fit the story I was telling myself about my resilient, industrious son.

A boy with a work ethic.