I was twenty-seven, unmarried, living in the small apartment above Reeves Hardware & Supply, where I worked the counter six days a week. I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my checking account and absolutely no idea how to warm a bottle.
“You can’t raise three babies alone,” my neighbor, Ms. Odetta, told me that first night, standing in my doorway with her arms crossed, not unkindly, just realistically.
She was probably right. But the smallest one — the one who’d come out weighing barely four pounds and had spent her first month in the hospital before Curtis ever brought them home — wrapped her whole fist around my index finger before I’d even finished dialing the number for social services.
So I stayed.
