“Because I love him.”
She sighed as if I had just announced that I intended to throw my life away.
“Love doesn’t pay the mortgage.”
I had heard that sentence so many times that it had almost become her personal philosophy.
It was also the sentence that explained why she had never understood my father.
His name was Daniel, and he died when I was sixteen.
He repaired furniture, painted houses, fixed broken fences, and accepted nearly every job people offered him. If a neighbor needed help carrying a refrigerator, Dad showed up. If an elderly woman couldn’t afford to repair her porch steps, he often did the work for less than it cost him.
He wasn’t a wealthy man.
Sometimes we struggled to pay our bills, and sometimes Mom spent evenings at the kitchen table studying envelopes with a calculator beside her.
I knew we didn’t have much money.
