I worked early-morning shifts at a local diner downtown and cleaned commercial office buildings three evenings each week. On weekends, I drove around town delivering grocery orders whenever my old sedan decided to cooperate. Some mornings I left before Toby even opened his eyes, and other nights I came home long after he had fallen asleep.
I never missed a single parent-teacher conference at his school. I packed his lunches late at night, slipping little handwritten notes underneath his sandwiches, and checked his math homework well past midnight while my exhausted eyes burned.
Toby noticed much more than I ever wanted him to notice. He knew when I ate plain cereal for dinner because there was only enough chicken for him and his grandmother. He understood why I lowered the hallway thermostat during cold weather. He even noticed that the brightest red apple always went into his lunchbox while the bruised ones remained on the kitchen counter for me.
One evening, he found me sitting at the kitchen table with unpaid bills scattered in front of me.
“Are we getting into big trouble?” he asked quietly, standing there in his pajamas.
I immediately turned the papers over to hide the red balances. “No, sweetie, not at all. I am just deciding which of these bills gets my attention first.”
He climbed onto the wooden chair beside me. “Sometimes I do my easiest reading homework first,” he offered with a small smile. “Maybe bills work the exact same way.”
I laughed softly, even as tears burned behind my eyes. That was Toby. Somehow, he could always discover a little spark of hope inside a pile of overdue envelopes.
Part 3: The Story Behind the Moon Shirt
I had purchased that navy moon shirt about four months before the custody hearing. Toby had become fascinated with astronomy after his second-grade class visited a local planetarium. Every evening, he talked endlessly about distant planets, brilliant stars, and how light could travel millions of years through space before reaching Earth.
One rainy evening, after completing a long cleaning shift in a downtown office building, I passed a small clothing store clearing out its old inventory. The navy shirt hung on a bargain rack near the front window. It was soft and durable, with a tiny silver moon stitched beside the front pocket.
