The day that our handyman committed suicide, he cleaned out my parents’ garage. They hadn’t asked him to purge the junk from those overstuffed car bays, the ones that hadn’t sheltered a vehicle since we moved in, but Harold saw that it needed to be done. He left the garage doors open so they would see it when they drove up the long, windy driveway.

When my parents first moved me and my two sisters to the little Appalachian town of Blue Ridge — back in the 90s when it was untouched by tourists and developers — we couldn’t afford a handyman.

I’m still not completely sure why my parents moved us from the manicured Dallas suburbs to a place where the majority of my classmates qualified for free or reduced school lunch. Or where an entire family showed up barefoot at the elementary school during my first-grade open house. Or where, having our classroom door ajar because the AC was broken, my teacher once accidentally let in an escaped hog while we were trying to learn fractions.

Read the rest at Chapter 16.