I need you to understand how heavy wet clothes actually are.

When you don’t have enough money to put them in the dryer, they just sit there in the blue plastic basket.

They smell like cheap lavender soap, but they are cold, and they are heavy.

My ex-wife, Sarah, walked out on us two years ago.

She didn’t just pack her bags and leave.

She took the emergency cash envelope I kept in the freezer under the frozen peas.

There was four hundred dollars in there.

She left me with our three girls.

Chloe is twelve, Mia is nine, and little Layla is four.

I work forty-eight hours a week at the warehouse near the interstate.

I make eighteen dollars an hour.

Before Sarah left, that money was just barely enough to get by.

After she left, it became a daily math problem that I could never solve.

Every Sunday, I carry our laundry to Spin City on 4th Street.

We have a cracked blue plastic basket.

I wrapped gray duct tape around the handle because the plastic was cutting into my fingers.

Usually, our routine is simple.

Three loads.

Seven dollars to wash.

Seven dollars to dry.

Fourteen dollars total.

But last Sunday, everything went wrong.

Mia came home from school on Friday with her left shoe completely ruined.

The sole was flapping like a tongue.

She had been walking on the cold pavement with her bare sock touching the ground.

She didn’t tell me because she knew we didn’t have the money.

I felt sick to my stomach when I saw it.

On Saturday, I took her to the discount store down the street.

We found a pair of basic black sneakers for fifteen dollars.

They were cheap, but they were whole.

That fifteen dollars came directly out of our laundry budget.

When Sunday morning came, I counted my quarters on the kitchen table.

I had exactly seven dollars and thirty-five cents.

I had enough to wash our clothes, but nothing left to dry them.

I thought about skipping the laundry, but Chloe had no clean school shirts left.

Mia’s jeans were covered in playground dirt.