I charged her five and did it in three weeks.

Then the café’s neighbor.

Then a wedding invitation suite for somebody at church.

Then, in the second year, a small publisher in Albany that does regional children’s books, who paid me thirty-one hundred dollars to illustrate a picture book about a lighthouse.

My name is on the cover of that book.

It is on a shelf in the children’s section of the public library on Ridge Street, which I have been to look at more than once, alone, like a lunatic.

I did not become successful.