Because hands like that do not come from a light Saturday job a boy takes on for pocket money and a bike.

Hands like that come from someone working past the point of comfort, past the point a child would push himself for his own sake, working with the grim determination of a person who cannot afford to stop.

My son’s hands were the hands of someone carrying something, and I held them every Sunday and rubbed lotion into the cracks and did not read what was written there, because I was not yet ready to know that my thirteen-year-old was working like a man three times his age to save us, and telling me it was for a bike.

A thirteen-year-old’s hands should be soft.