“Why did nobody ever tell me any of this?” I asked.
Cole gave me a tired, almost apologetic look. “Because your father hated being thanked for things. He used to say it ruined the whole point of doing them.”
After Dad died, Paulette got worse. Cole left school to care for her full-time, working whatever he could find around it. She died a few months later. By the time he showed up beside the dump, he was seventeen — orphaned, homeless, unemployed, with nowhere left standing that he could call his own.
Nowhere left standing that he could call his own.
A nearby recycling yard sometimes paid him cash for sorting scrap, though the work stayed irregular, and the local shelters filled up faster than anyone could keep track of. Mom fed him because she genuinely believed my father would have done exactly the same thing, without hesitation, even on the weeks our own cupboards looked close to empty.
