She was a receptionist for a family-law attorney upstairs, and when she understood — quickly, from the suitcase and the three children and something in my face — that we were living in a motel room, she took an appointment card out of her bag and wrote a phone number on the back of it and pressed it into my hand.

“Call her,” she said. “Today. Tell her Joyce sent you.”

I would think about Joyce Keller many times in the year that followed — a stranger in a waiting room who owed me nothing and stopped anyway.

My own mother had shut a door on her grandchildren the night before, and a woman whose last name I would barely remember had crouched down to give my son a granola bar and hand me the number that changed everything.

I had spent my whole life believing that family was the people obligated to catch you.

I was learning, that morning, in a fluorescent room that smelled like burnt coffee, that sometimes the people who catch you are simply the ones who choose to, and that the two categories do not overlap nearly as much as anyone wants them to.