Published: 2 Sep 2019

I went back to my dorm room, not exactly sure what just happened, but there was a handful of paperwork in my hand that explained it all in black and white. I knew all the answers were in the paperwork and I would read through it all in just a few minutes, but I needed some time to absorb all that had just taken place in Mrs. Martin’s office.

I’m Jared, Jared Denver. I’m just 17 today and no, it wasn’t a school dorm I was returning to, it was a dorm room where 19 other teens and I lived in the CPS facility here in the Mile-High City, Denver. Other age groups were housed on other floors of the institution we all lived at. I knew these dorm rooms well; I had lived here since I was born seventeen years ago today. I knew what today’s meeting was all about, after all I had seen over a dozen guys have to go through the same thing every year since I could remember. The meeting was between Mrs. Martin, the director of the shelter, Miss Young, my caseworker for the last three years, and some guy from administration.

The purpose of the meeting was to get my take on what would happen in exactly one year, when I turned 18 and would be denied the right to continue to live here and be given cab fare or bus fare to leave for good, from the only home I had ever known. They had presented me with several options for my future, and luckily my caseworker, Miss Young, had been preparing me for the last year, or more, to be able to face this eventuality.

She was young, just a few years out of college and I had been one of the first cases assigned to her. She was enthusiastic and upbeat, and she actually treated me like a younger brother. She watched over my school reports and never failed to encourage me in my studies and to get good grades. Until two years ago I was kind of a lumpy nerd, not at all interested in my appearance or being healthy. She introduced me to her boyfriend who was a personal trainer and together we exercised and made ourselves healthier. She also encouraged me to apply for early admittance to several colleges, actually helping me with the application process. She and her boyfriend were the only outside influences on my life, outside of some of my teachers in the high school I attended, but those teachers were overwhelmed by the amount of students in their inner city classrooms and just about all of us students never received one to one time with the teachers.

Miss Young and her boyfriend sometimes even took me on bike rides with them, we sometimes went to the movies together, and once we had even gone camping for a whole weekend to one of the campsites near the Garden of the Gods National Park where we saw incredible natural rock and stone formations. As I said, they taught me a lot about living a healthier lifestyle and I was now pretty buff, weighing a cool one hundred and seventy pounds of solid muscle, instead of the almost 200 pounds of fat I had been.

I left the paperwork under my bed pillow and left for my shift in the cafeteria kitchen where I worked for the pre-dinner shift four days a week, right after school and then after eating my dinner I would stay and run the big dishwasher to ensure there were clean plates and utensils for the breakfast shift to use. After my shift I had homework to do and after an hour and a half of that was free time for me before lights out. I used that time to read through the paperwork I had been handed at the meeting. I was particularly interested in the financial statement by the guy from the administration office.

I didn’t really expect anything more than the couple of thousand dollars the state issued to those that had aged out of the system, but in my financial statement there showed that in a year, when I did age out of the system, there would be twenty thousand dollars in my own bank account. This was explained in further detail this way; “Among the belongings of the birth mother had been an expensive wristwatch and a pair of diamond earrings and a diamond pendant. It had been determined at that time to have the jewelry and watch sold and those funds placed into a trust for Jared to be paid out to him upon his 18^th birthday”. I knew about my mother and the circumstances of my birth; my mother had shown up at a local hospital and had given birth an hour later, never giving the hospital staff her name or any information, other than that she needed help. She had died from a brain aneurysm less than ten minutes after I had been born.

While I was in my high school science class that senior year, we learned how DNA samples from two different people, or from groups of people, could identify their heritage and even pin down what areas of the earth these samples indicated their ancestors came from. We learned that DNA was often used these days to tie a criminal to a crime, help unite families separated by immigration, or even identify a birth parent, or a sibling, or other relatives of an orphan. Our teacher showed us the results he had gotten back from a sample of his DNA he had sent in to a testing company and even though his known family history up to that point was thought to be French, his test profile actually showed his origins were actually from the coast of Northern Africa.

I was flabbergasted when he selected me as one of the three students he wanted to send in samples of our DNA to the same testing company he had used. He knew it would take some months to get the results back, and so he wanted to take a swab of our inner cheeks to send in and hopefully get the results back sometime after the Winter holidays. He said he would let us write our term papers on the subject if we wanted to. He had chosen Sean O’Reily, Madeline Okumbo, and me as the test subjects. Sean identified as Irish, Madeline had been told her roots were in Bangladesh, and since everyone knew I was an orphan (I had never tried to hide it) I could be the wild card. He made no attempt to try and tell us relations would be found for any of us, but he did say that if someone else had sent in their DNA sample there was a possibility that a relative could also be matched to us.

During that Fall semester of my Senior year I had applied to about a dozen colleges and universities, some in Colorado and many in other states. Most of my applications included requests for scholarships as well, and there were three dozen separate scholarship applications sent out as well. Several teachers of mine at the high school, and staff at the state run shelter/orphanage I lived in, wrote letters of recommendation for me and some of the state run colleges and universities in Colorado had programs set up to educate the state’s orphans, but I really wanted to try for a school in the South, someplace where the weather was not as harsh, somewhere I would feel comfortable most of the year round. Of course, if I was able to get a full ride scholarship, I could make myself be comfortable almost anywhere.

I told you that I was a big fat nerd until Miss Young and her boyfriend took me in hand and taught me how to exercise and eat right, so I guess there is something I should let you know also, that not only was I extremely shy around strangers, but I was also quite soft spoken and pretty damn smart. Add to that my exceptional writing skills and that I actually enjoyed tutoring others in the residence hall/ dormitory I lived in, and it was no wonder that I wanted to teach for a living, preferably English, or maybe English Literature, since I was also an avid reader.

The two-week holiday period that senior year had a couple of firsts for me to experience. The first was Miss Young’s wedding to Sam Clarke. They treated me like a younger brother and had invited me to their New Year’s Eve wedding, something I had never seen in person, and here I was, sitting in the second row, behind Miss Young’s parents, watching the two people who had made my life bearable and so much more enriched, and healthier, these last few years, get married.

The couple had known that I would be uncomfortable attending their wedding and a couple of weeks before the event they had brought along a cousin of Sam’s to the gym at the YWCA we were working out at. He was just a month younger than me and his name was Michael. He was also kind of nerdy, but he had toned his body also, I found out, with the help of Sam, his older cousin. I, for some reason, didn’t feel awkward around Michael. Yes, there were some differences between us, like he had grown up in a loving family, he was light of hair and coloring where as I was dark haired and had a swarthy complexion. Our similarities? Well, he was as smart as I was, we were both pretty buff, and as I found out after the reception, we were both gay. He was assigned to be my companion during the wedding and the reception, but he ended up being my first lover and our affair lasted through the rest of our Winter vacation and right up to… well, that would be giving up a lot of story now, wouldn’t it?

Mike and I found out we both attended the same large inner-city high school, but because we didn’t share any classes we had never met, but that all changed during our second semester. Mike changed almost his entire schedule, so we did end up with about three classes and a study period a day together. I have to admit; we visited a lot all those months leading to the Spring. We studied together, we applied to colleges together, and with some help we applied to a whole bunch of groups and associations for their scholarships. His family wasn’t what you’d call rich, but they were comfortable and he did have a college fund savings account that would have paid his tuition at a junior college, but he too wanted to teach and if he didn’t get some financial help he would be like me and have to work and scrimp to pay the tuition for his final two years. Even then he might have to get a regular job for a year or two to be able to pay for his masters at least, which a lot of school districts required now of their new hires.

The newlyweds, the Clarkes, had Sam’s cousin and I over to their apartment several times to help us file Mike’s applications as they had helped me just before their wedding. Then, near the first of February, I started to get mail. I mean mail addressed to me, at the shelter. This had never really happened in all the years I had been here. It started out with an acceptance letter from a small college in the Northeast. Unfortunately, there was no offer of financial assistance included, but it was a big boost to my ego just to be accepted. Three days later there were three letters. Two of the accepting colleges had small financial aid included, the third was like the first acceptance letter, just that, acceptance without financial aid. That Saturday there was a manila envelope in my mailbox. This felt like what I was hoping for, Sam and his wife Carole (Miss Young) had told me that a packet instead of a letter usually would mean there were forms that had to be filled out for scholarships or financial aid.

I really wanted to open this one right away, but my nerves got the better of me and after my shift in the cafeteria the next day I called Mike and asked if he would drive over and be with me when I opened it. He did me one better and he drove me to the Clarke’s apartment and the three of them watched me as I slit the end open and removed a packet of paperwork, a college catalog, and an acceptance letter from my number one choice of schools, and this was based on schools with a high ranking acceptance of gay students (not the weather as I had originally thought), the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

I was offered a “full ride scholarship”. Room, board (meals), tuition, and books, and a small monthly stipend for some spending money. If I maintained a B+ or better average for my student years I would be eligible for the post grad scholarship extension which would cover my Master’s Degree studies and room and board for those additional years also. This was all based on my application essays, my high SAT scores, and my straight A average in my previous school grades.

I was speechless, but my companions were more than happy for me. We all hugged, and Mike slipped up and kissed me as he and I hugged, but Sam and Carole didn’t even bat an eye as I returned that kiss. Mike then pulled from his sweater the same kind of manila envelope from UMASS and he slit it open and we saw his eyes water as he grinned hugely. He too had been offered the exact same deal as I had been. We had ten days to accept the offers or the scholarships and financial aid would be passed on to other applicants. We went on line with Sam and Carole right then and there and accepted their offers which would guarantee our places as freshmen in their Fall semester. None of the other acceptance letters that came in came anywhere near the offers from UMASS. I guessed that another five or six years of enduring winters was in my future.

Mike reported that his Mom and Dad were ecstatic about his good fortune and when they learned that I too had been accepted; they sent an inquiry into the University to see if we could be assigned as roommates. They knew about our relationship and surprisingly they approved of us being a couple. By the first of February I was to receive a different sort of mail, this time it was also one that would change my life forever, but in a totally different way than the college acceptance letters had.

The letter was one from the DNA testing lab and genealogy search company my science teacher had submitted DNA samples to during the previous term. I was even more nervous about opening this envelope, it was rather thick. I called Mike and he came right over to the residence and with him and Carole present I opened it. The first sheet of the several in the envelope was the result of the DNA search for where my ancestors were supposed to have come from, Western Europe, most likely from France. But the other sheets were more of a complicated genealogy search which was traceable because someone else had also used their service to trace their ancestry. The complicated family tree went on for three pages and it ended with my name in a box, the date of my birth under my name, the one before that contained my mother’s full name and a birth and death date under it, (the date of my birth), the spot for her spouse’s name had a question mark in it. The box above that had the names of my Maternal grandparents in it, with a birth and death date under my grandmother’s name, but just a birth date under my grandfather’s name.

There was a letter explaining that for some time my grandfather had been searching for any offspring his daughter might have had. A copy of a hand written letter he had submitted to several of these DNA testing services was also included, explaining that his daughter was 18 when she announced at dinner one night, she was in love with her college aged boyfriend and she was going to Colorado to be with him. Of course, her parents tried to get her to see reason, but that only had spurred her into leaving by bus the next day. Her father told in his letter how they had tracked her to the bus terminal in Denver, but had lost her trail, and not knowing anything about her boyfriend they never did find her, although fliers had been posted, detectives had been hired, and even a TV spot had run on the local news stations. The DNA service said in their cover letter that since I was so close to the age of majority that it would be my decision to contact him, but for now all they would do is to inform him that a match in our DNA had happened, not my name or where I lived.

Mike held me as I cried. This was something that probably ten years ago I would have jumped for joy about, but at this point I had, I thought, sorted out my future basically on my own, with some help from friends. I had seen how families worked, from a distance, and I felt that if my grandfather found out I was gay then he wouldn’t want anything to do with me anyway, so why go through the heartache of meeting him, just to lose him. It just all seemed so unnecessary to me at that time. I took the papers, stuffed them into their envelope and stashed it in one of my books in an old plastic milk crate by my bed.

Mike tried to get me to see other ways to look at the situation, but I was stubborn and decided to stick with my first instinctive reaction. I was doing alright, I had a future, and I also had someone to share that future with, what more did I need?

Two weeks later I needed all the help I could get. Mike and I had gone out for Valentine’s day. The dinner was special, we shared a two-seater table at a downtown restaurant, rubbing knees almost the whole time, and the romantic comedy we saw at the local movie theater was fun and we held hands through most of it. We were walking to the car park after when three thugs jumped us, stealing our wallets, Mike’s cell phone, and beating on both of us, but as I have mentioned, we were both in good shape and we inflicted almost as much damage upon them as they did on us, but one of the thugs had a piece of pipe on him which he used to bash into the side of Mike’s head before he got away, the other two now struggling to get away from me. A police cruiser appeared, and the officer helped me subdue the remaining two miscreants and called in for an ambulance to take care of Mike who was totally out of it by that point.

The rest of that night was one horrible nightmare, the police, the doctors, Mike’s parents, all trying to tell me that he’d pull through. The police wanted my statement, then I had to identify the one who had bashed Mike when they caught him an hour later. The doctors were performing miracles on Mike and his mother wouldn’t let me out of her embrace while his dad held my hand as we waited for word on his condition. We were told that Mike would be placed in a medically induced coma to help his brain cope with the inflammation, and once the swelling had gone down they would repair the cracks in his skull, there wasn’t anything we could do for him tonight (very early morning) so they insisted that the best option for us was to go home so we would be fresh for him when he would need us in a few days when his coma was lifted. They wouldn’t try to prevent us from sitting by his bedside during visiting hours, but they thought for now we should get some rest.

The next day his parents picked me up and we did hold vigil for Mike in the morning visiting hours and the afternoon and evening ones. Mr. Clarke had been in touch with his medical insurance carrier and he was now fretting about the expected medical bills which would be extremely high just for their co-pay. I vowed to get a job and drop out of school to help them, but Mrs. Clarke forbade me from doing that. She told me that it wouldn’t look good to the University we were going to attend, and without a high school diploma I wouldn’t make enough to be able to help much.

I talked this all out with Sam and Carole when they came to hold vigil with us the next day and Carole immediately went into case worker mode, telling me under the circumstances she couldn’t let me throw away the opportunity the University had presented both Mike and me with, but she wondered if maybe, just maybe, my grandfather might be able to help in some way.

She pointed out to me that the address to contact him was a lawyer’s office, a lawyer’s office in Florida, Key West, Florida to be exact, not exactly a poor community. And why would any responses to his inquiry be through a lawyer’s office? She thought it might just be to protect the inquirer from scammers and people trying to take advantage of their elderly client. She convinced me to at least consider it, for Mike’s sake, and his parents’. If nothing else, I’d have an older and wiser family member to help me through what was going to happen sometime in the near future and beyond.

Four days later the doctors tried to bring Mike out of the coma. They needed to see how he was healing, was the reduction in the swelling of his brain going to lead to a full recovery? Was he ready for them to stabilize his skull fractures? Would his injuries prevent him from being able to testify at our attackers’ trial? And the dreaded question, would Mike suffer from any long-term brain damage from the attack and would he be able to resume his studies in this the last semester of high school and be able to go on the University with me?

He recognized his parents and me when he started to come out of his coma, and he burst into tears as he clung to me. I resolved again to do anything I could do to help him and his loving family. That night back in the dorm I wrote a letter to my grandfather, including copies of the DNA test results and their version of my family tree. I dropped it in a mailbox on my way to the bus stop, planning to go to the other side of town to visit Mike in his hospital room. He wouldn’t be awake from the skull realignment surgical procedure yet, but I wanted to be with him when he awoke, along with his parents who would join me in a couple of hours.

As I sat by Mike’s bedside, waiting for the anesthesia to wear off from what his surgeon said was a very successful procedure, I thought about what I was going to do with that bonus money held in trust for me until I turned 18 in June. I was going to give it all to Mike’s parents, to help defray their huge co-pay debt on their insurance. If as Carole said, that my grandfather lived in an expensive town, then just maybe he would be able to help out somehow so Mike and I didn’t have to work to help them pay this debt down, already they had been talking to each other about taking out a second mortgage and working second jobs.

Mike did come around from his anesthesia induced slumber, experiencing a horrible headache until the nurses came to give him something in his IV that was supposed to help with that. We held hands and talked softly to each other until his parents got out of work and came right to the hospital to check on their boy. They were so pleased he had come out of the realignment procedure where the broken pieces of his skull were put back in place. He would end up with several scars up there, but hopefully his hair would cover those up once it had a chance to grow back where they had had to shave it.

Just before his dinner arrived a police officer came to have him try to pick out his attacker from some mug shots he had, I had to leave the room while Mike did this, and then I had to do the same when the officer asked me to come back in the room. He told us that all three of our attackers were still in custody and would now have attempted murder added to the charges they already faced.

Mr. Clarke went out to a fast food restaurant to get burgers for him and his wife and he also brought me one and a small ginger ale to go with it. We ate while Mike had his post-op liquid and soft food meal. We three took a bit of a ribbing from him as we chewed our meals, but we were hungry, and pleased he felt well enough to pick on us. Our talk was eventually focused on the school work Mike was missing, and would possibly miss, before he was able to return to school, but I assured him, and his parents, that I would bring his assignments home with me and we’d continue to do our homework together while he healed enough to return to school. Eventually it was time for us all to go, so Mike kissed his mom and got a hug from his dad and they went out into the hall to give us a few private moments to say our goodnights to each other.

As they dropped me off at the CPS facility, they again thanked me profusely for caring so much for their son and preventing even more injury to him than he had received. Ten days later, as I was getting ready to catch the city bus to ride to the hospital to go over Mike’s assignments with him, I noticed a piece of mail in my mailbox outside my dorm room. I stuffed it in my backpack and went on to catch the bus to the hospital. When I pulled out Mike’s assignments once I was in his room the envelope fell to the floor. I picked it up as Mike went through the assignments to get ready for our homework session. I gasped when I saw the handwritten words on the front, my name and address at the CPS dorm facility, and the return address: Jonathan Strauss, 426 Elizabeth Street, Key West, Fl 33040. My grandfather had written back already.

While Mike was absorbed in his homework, I sat in the chair next to him and read my grandfather’s letter. He wrote to me about my mother, and how she had been a surprise late in life child for him and his wife, and how she had met my father while she was a high school student and had had a month’s long relationship with him while he was in their town attending the junior college there, but had seemed to disappear as soon as my mother had discovered she was pregnant with me. He went on to explain how she had searched for him, eventually getting information he was in Colorado and she had taken off to try and find him as soon as she had this thin lead.

He wrote that she had taken off without telling anyone, and how frantic he and my grandmother were to find her. Until getting my letter he had had no idea of my existence, just a vague thought in the back of his mind that my mother might have been pregnant when she ran after my father, a worry that his wife had shared. He said that once he had received my letter, he gave what little information I had given him to his investigators, and they had finally been able to piece together all the fragments of their investigations over the past seventeen years.

He went on to tell me that he wanted us to meet, that he was hoping that could happen soon, and that under the circumstances I was in, that he knew that might not happen right away. He knew that I couldn’t just hop on a plane and come to him, it would be up to him to come to me, and that might just take a little while as he was recovering from a recent surgery and wasn’t able to fly yet. He said in his letter he wanted to make sure I was provided for and he was enclosing a check for five thousand dollars to use for whatever I needed until he could fly up to meet me. He asked me to call him, or at least write him, to keep our lines of communication open. And he signed this letter with “Love, Grandpa”.

I have to admit that there were tears falling by then, and when Mike noticed this, I handed him the letter to read and he too had some tears rolling down his cheeks. He reached out for me and we were still a bit weepy as we hugged, and he told me how happy he was for me. We were just about to talk about the letter when Mike’s parents came in, momentarily stopped in their tracks by the sight in front of them, not that we were hugging, but because we both had tear streaked faces. Mrs. Clarke rushed to enfold us in her arms and was asking what had happened, what was wrong?

Once we had a chance to catch our breaths, we both explained the letter and that my grandfather had contacted me, and it looked like he was willing to come to meet me as soon as he was physically able.

Then we felt Mr. Clarke’s arms enfold all of us as both his parents told me how happy they were for me.

We learned about an hour later that Mike would possibly be released the middle of the next week, as soon as the doctors were assured that the broken sections of his skull were healing properly. That was great news and he was so looking forward to his release. When Sam and Carole arrived just after dinner time Carole and I walked out to the waiting room after she learned of my grandfather’s letter. I let her read it and she was so pleased for me. She asked if I had plans for calling him and I told her I didn’t have enough change for the pay phone in the corner of the room, but she told me that she would let me use her cell phone if I felt ready now to make the call. I told her I was scared and apprehensive, but yeah, I was ready. We moved out to the staircase and settled on the stairs to place the call and to give me some privacy.

The phone rang for about three rings before I heard a male voice answer. “Strauss residence”, I had expected an older voice, but I cleared my throat and asked to speak to Mr. Jonathan Strauss. The man on the other end asked if he was speaking to Jason and I replied it was me and he asked me to hold on for just a moment. The next voice I heard was a much more mature voice, cracking with emotion. He thanked me for calling and he apologized for not being able to come to meet me in person, but he had just had surgery to repair some broken bones in his left shoulder and was waiting for his next post-op, doctors appointment next week to be able to fly up and see me. I thanked him for explaining that and for the check he had sent me, I told him I had a very good use for it. He didn’t pry and didn’t ask what I was going to use it for, but he did say that if all was well on his visit to the doctor he would try and get up to see me next Friday afternoon, he’d try and time it so he would be able to meet me right when I got out of school.

I told him about the attack on Mike and me and how he wouldn’t be released from the hospital until next week, hopefully on Wednesday. I told him that after school I would be either at Mike’s house or at the hospital to visit him if he was still there on Friday. I told him that other than calling the CPS facility to reach me, he could call my caseworker’s number, her name was Carole and she was married to Mike’s cousin Sam. Carole would know where I was Friday, or really any day, as I had to have her permission to even leave the CPS facility.

We talked for a few more minutes. I think that after he had made some comments about our attack (and he did ask some thoughtful questions about that), we both thought that “getting to know you” questions would be better asked when we were face to face, so he thanked me for getting in touch, and he hoped to meet me next Friday.

That night I started to write in my journal all the things that were going through my mind at that point and there was great relief that Mike was hopefully improving, and quite a bit of anticipation about meeting my grandfather. Mike’s stamina improved almost daily and when Tuesday came around his main doctor told us that he was going to release Mike from the hospital on Wednesday, but he wouldn’t be able to attend school for another week. His thoughts were that until the skull bones had a chance to firmly bond, he didn’t want Mike to be jostled in the halls, or risk a bad fall that could damage the work they had already done with his skull fractures. That same afternoon we had a visit from an assistant DA who told Mike, and me, and his parents that the three thugs had taken a plea deal and my two attackers were taking a deal to serve ten years each and the idiot who attacked Mike with the pipe was taking a deal for fifteen to twenty years with a possibility of parole after fifteen years had been served.

That was all such a relief, but also frustrating as now we wouldn’t get to state our own views of what those idiots had tried to do to us and what impact the severe injuries that asshole did to Mike, I mean that here was a near death situation and who knew just what implications that would have for Mike in the future? His parents were overjoyed to have him back to their apartment and so was I. I could walk there instead of taking the city bus to the hospital, and at their apartment we had the privacy we needed, without a nurse or doctor walking in on us.

His parents had offered to go through the fostering process early on in our relationship, but knowing I would be out of the system in only six months, and knowing that they would have to move to a bigger apartment to accommodate the systems requirements, we agreed to tough it out until I aged out of the system and then Mike had insisted that we either get another twin bed for his room, or replace his twin bed with a larger one we would share. He said I would be the boarder in their home, one with benefits, and his parents agreed!!

Our studying together in the hospital was paying off, as Mike was able to easily pass the tests the tutor gave him on Thursday at his home, his mom reported to me when I stopped by that afternoon after class and just before my shift in the shelter’s cafeteria. She again thanked me for taking such good care of her son. She insisted that she cook dinner for not only her family the next night, but she wanted me and my grandfather to eat with them. She had called Carole and had her arrange for someone to cover my shift that evening so I wouldn’t have to work, and I’d have more time to spend with my grandfather. She also told me that she had invited Sam and Carole for dinner also, but everyone had agreed that I should have as much time to get to know my grandfather as possible since none of us knew just how long he intended to stay in Denver.

Friday finally came and I had a terrible time concentrating on my classes, but three o’clock finally came and as previously arranged I gathered my stuff and the few new assignments for Mike and took the school bus back to the CPS facility and then walked the four blocks to Mike’s family’s apartment. He and I spent some time trying to get me focused on helping him with the assignments and in between those we talked about me meeting my grandfather. We had been studying for about an hour and a half when we became aware that Mrs. Clarke and Carole were talking to someone out in the living room and then there were loud exclamations and we distinctly heard Mrs. Clarke sobbing and then a soft knock on Mike’s closed bedroom door. Carole was standing there, smiling, but there was evidence of tears that had streaked her cheeks.

Mike asked what was going on out there and Carole said that my grandfather had just come from the hospital and he had paid off all of the twenty-seven thousand dollars of non-insurance covered expenses for Mike’s operation and hospital stay, why didn’t we come out with her to meet him?

Art has once again graced us with another of his stories. You may contact him by email: ArtWest at CastleRoland dot Net

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