That was the whole of my competence, and none of it was going to help me now.

My neighbor from across the landing came out in her robe to see what the commotion was, and she looked at the car seats, and she looked at me, and she said the thing that everyone would say, in one form or another, for the next twenty-two years.

“Abel,” she said, not unkindly, “you can’t raise triplets by yourself.”

She was probably right.

Looking at it on paper — a broke single man, three infants, a bank account you couldn’t feed a family on for a week — she was almost certainly right.

And I had the number for social services already half-dialed in my head, because that was the sensible thing, the responsible thing, the thing a reasonable person does when the world hands him something three sizes too big to carry.