I was seven months pregnant, broke, and barely holding it together when I saw him for the first time—the poor old man with tired eyes, hunched shoulders, and a scruffy dog pressed close to his leg as if it were the only thing anchoring him to this world.
It had been a long, exhausting day already. My back ached constantly, I was out of breath from simply walking across the parking lot, and the grocery list in my hand looked more like a cruel joke than something achievable with the few bills I had left in my wallet.
My husband, Tyler, and I were scraping by after he had been laid off from his construction job. I was working part-time at a call center, but the hours weren’t enough, and between rent, utilities, and preparing for the baby, we were drowning.
I remember standing in the store aisle staring at a pack of diapers, calculating and recalculating whether I could afford them if I skipped out on the jar of peanut butter or the loaf of bread. That’s when I noticed him at the register.