Nine years earlier, I’d learned otherwise.

Chapter 2 — Another Mouth

At fifty-nine, after thirty-one years driving long-haul trucks, my back finally quit. Two ruptured discs. Surgery that helped, for a while. Then a doctor with sympathetic eyes explained there were limits to what my body could take.

Disability payments were small and slow. The medical bills were neither. Within a year my savings vanished, my tools were sold, my truck was mortgaged, and I lost the modest house on Sycamore Street I’d spent twenty years paying for.

It wasn’t fancy — two bedrooms, a cramped kitchen, a maple tree that clogged the gutters every fall. But it had been home. I knew every squeaky floorboard and stubborn window.

When Rebecca was eight, I’d painted her bedroom lavender because she once told me white walls reminded her of hospitals.

After losing that house, I packed what remained of my life into boxes and did the one thing I’d always promised myself I never would. I asked my daughter for help.