When I married Evelyn, I was twenty-five years old, broke, buried in debt, and spending my nights sleeping in the cab of my pickup truck behind a grocery store on the edge of town.
She was seventy-one. A widow. Soft-spoken. Kind. She lived in a warm little house on a quiet street where the neighbors waved from their porches and someone always seemed to be mowing a lawn or walking a dog or carrying groceries in from the car. It was the kind of street I had grown up driving past and never thought I would live on.
And no, I did not marry her out of love.
I told myself I was doing what I had to do to survive. Stay a few years. Play the role of devoted husband. Wait for the house to become mine someday. Then finally escape the life that had been grinding me down since I was nineteen. I had a plan, or what I called a plan, which was really just desperation with a timeline attached to it.
What had brought me to that point was a series of choices and circumstances that ran together so thoroughly I had stopped being able to tell them apart. I had left home at seventeen with a bag and the phone number of a cousin who turned out to have moved two states away. I had worked a string of jobs that paid just enough to keep me from being smart about money, if that makes any sense. A restaurant job led to a car payment I could not sustain. A job at a warehouse led to a loan I took out to cover the car, then another loan to cover the first one. By twenty-two I had $45,000 in debt and the earning capacity of someone who had never finished community college, which I had started twice and quit twice, once because of money and once because of what the money situation had done to me by then.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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