The fact that she loved me made life a hell of a lot more bearable than it had been before. I didn't have the best of childhoods; my mother was a truck stop waitress who got knocked up by a trucker who used to come through town and sell her dreams. Until the day she told him she was pregnant, and she never laid eyes on him again. As a kid, I spent lots of time alone. Being raised in a small- town, people didn't follow the same tenets as big-city dwellers.
No one thought too much about a young single mom leaving her five-year-old son alone while she went out to make a living during the summer months when school was out. That kid learned a lot about the streets at an early age.
The old guys who hung around at the local bar didn't have any problem teaching him the facts of life. When most
