Nothing fancy.
But everything we own has been earned.
I worked thirty-one years as a receptionist at Dr. Ferris’s dental office on Battlefield Road. I answered phones and made appointments and calmed down crying children and talked grown men out of canceling their root canals. I retired last year. They gave me a cake and a plaque and a gift card to Olive Garden.
Gary drove delivery trucks for a beverage distributor for thirty-four years. Soda, mostly, and beer. He knew every gas station and grocery store and bar in five counties. He retired in 2020, the spring everything shut down. He says it was the best timing of his life.
Between us, we made every mortgage payment on that house. Every single one. Three hundred and thirty-six of them. We repaired every leaking pipe, replaced the roof twice, rebuilt the septic system, put in central air in 2007 after the summer it hit a hundred and eight. We saved for every home improvement. We never once missed a payment.
Well. Almost never. But I’ll get to that.
Gary has a daughter from his first marriage.
Her name is Brittany. She’s thirty-eight now.
I’ve known her since she was nine.
Gary and his first wife, Sheila, divorced when Brittany was six. It was ugly. Sheila moved to Joplin with Brittany and remarried a man who sold boats. Gary got every other weekend and two weeks in the summer. He was not good at it. I’ll be honest. He was young and he was hurt and he drank too much back then, and some weekends he didn’t show up to get her. Brittany would sit on Sheila’s front step in Joplin with her little backpack, waiting, and Gary would call at six o’clock and say something came up.
I met Gary when Brittany was nine. He was thirty-three, divorced, delivering Pepsi to the gas station next to Dr. Ferris’s office. He asked me out four times before I said yes. On our third date, he told me about Brittany sitting on the step with her backpack.
“I’m a lousy father,” he said. “I know it. I want to be better.”
I believed him. I married him two years later.
And for the next twenty-nine years, I helped him try. 