I work at a half-falling-apart shop on the edge of town. The kind of place where the oil stains in the concrete have been there so long they are practically part of the foundation, where the coffee maker gave up sometime around 2012 and nobody bothered to replace it because that would require agreeing on which model to buy, and where the heating system works on a schedule entirely its own and bears no relationship to the actual temperature outside.The shop is not much, but it is mine in the sense that I know every corner of it, every stubborn bolt and every quirk in the lift mechanisms and which customers are going to be difficult before they even open their mouths. I have been doing this since I was nineteen. Seventeen years of grease under my fingernails and twelve-hour days and coming home so tired that some nights I fall asleep in my truck in the driveway before I can make it inside.

I am thirty-six years old. I am a single father raising triplets.
Three six-year-olds. All born the same morning, all looking at me now like I have the answers to questions they have not finished forming yet. My daughter has her grandmother’s eyes and her mother’s stubbornness and a laugh that sounds like pure trouble in the best possible way. Her brothers are different from each other in ways that still surprise me, one loud and curious and always taking things apart to see what is inside, the other quieter and watchful, the kind of kid who notices things adults miss.

Their mother left when they were eight months old. She walked out one morning with a suitcase and said she could not do it anymore, and that was the last time any of us saw her. I have spent a long time making peace with that sentence, and I will not say I have finished making peace with it, only that I have gotten good at not letting it pull me under on days when I need to stay above the surface.

My mother moved in to help. She is seventy-two years old and sharper than most people half her age, and she has a particular way of looking at me across the kitchen that communicates volumes without a single word. She is the one who braids my daughter’s hair every morning. She is the one who makes sure the kids eat an actual breakfast before school instead of just cereal and whatever fruit has not gone soft yet. She is the one who was standing in my living room holding a baby on each hip when I came home from the shop that first week after their mother left, and she just looked at me and said, “Well. We will figure it out.”