My ex-wife and her new husband refused to pay the $7,000+ bill after I spent almost a week repairing their badly damaged Mercedes. I didn’t argue or chase them for the money. I just smiled, said, “Okay,” and handed them a document to sign. Neither of them even bothered to read it. At exactly 5:03 the next morning, my phone rang with my ex-wife screaming, “Craig! What did you do?!”

“I don’t have much money. I just need the car to get to work Monday.”

Noah proudly announced that his dad could fix anything. Then he added that sometimes I barely charged people when they didn’t have enough money.

The problem was only a cracked radiator hose. It took twenty minutes and about forty dollars in parts, but I charged her ten.

After she left, Noah asked why.

“Because she needed the money more than I did.”

“Like Mom and Brent?”

I knelt beside him.

“No. They had money. They just didn’t think my work was worth paying for.”

I explained that the woman understood the repair had value even though she couldn’t afford much. Noah thought about that, nodded, and picked up his wrench.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Rick says okay is like a plan.”

I laughed and lifted him onto my shoulders.

“Yeah, buddy. Okay is like a plan.”

We stood beneath the old plywood sign that Rick and Noah had painted years earlier, watching cars pass along Linden Avenue. The crooked letters were still there, along with Noah’s smeared C and the ghost of Rick’s backward P.

Years ago, Laura told me I was going nowhere.

She was wrong.

Every morning at 6:30, I know exactly where I’m going. Every Wednesday at 5:30, I know exactly where I need to be, and every night I return to a little house where a one-armed green dinosaur named Chompy keeps watch from the windowsill.

That isn’t nowhere.

That’s home.