My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.

Then she went out and shut the door.

That was it. No note afterward. No phone call. Not one card, in fifteen years, to any of the six of them.

And I stayed, because there was nothing else to do. That is not a virtue and I have gotten very tired of being told it is one. There were six girls in that house and one adult left in it and the math was not complicated.

Nights at Pilcher, five to five. Deliveries on Saturdays. My sister Dot took the little ones during the overlap and I slept from six-thirty in the morning until two in the afternoon for about nine years.