At the time, she considered it a temporary leave of absence. Once he was a little older, she had planned to go back to teaching. The money, she knew, would run out eventually, and she had to earn a living. Besides, teaching was something she’d loved. She’d missed her students and fellow teachers after her first week away. Now, years later, she was still at home with Kyle and the world of teaching in a school was nothing but a vague and distant memory, something more akin to a dream than a reality. She couldn’t remember a single lesson plan or the names of the students she had taught. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that she’d never done it at all.

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief. Her father, her mother, her grandparents-all gone before she turned twenty-one. At that point in her life she’d been to five different funeral homes yet legally couldn’t enter a bar to wash the sorrow away. She’d suffered more than her fair share of challenges, but God, it seemed, couldn’t stop at just that. Like Job’s struggles, hers continued to go on. “Middle-class lifestyle?” Not anymore. “Friends you’ve grown up with?” You must leave them behind. “A job to enjoy?” It is too much to ask. And Kyle, the sweet, wonderful boy for whom all this was done-in many ways he was still a mystery to her.

Instead of teaching she worked the evening shift at a diner called Eights, a busy hangout on the outskirts of Edenton. The owner there, Ray Toler, was a sixty-something black man who’d run the place for thirty years. He and his wife had raised six kids, all of whom went to college. Copies of their diplomas hung along the back wall, and everyone who ate there knew about them. Ray made sure of that. He also liked to talk about Denise. She was the only one, he liked to say, who’d ever handed him a r#233;sum#233; when interviewing for the job.

Ray was a man who understood poverty, a man who understood kindness, a man who understood how hard it was for single mothers.