The Man Who Raised Me
My name is Anna.
The man who raised me works for the city.
My dad, Joe, has been a garbage collector for as long as I can remember.
Sanitation department. Trash pickup. Whatever name people want to give it.
My mom died when I was three.
Cancer. Fast and unforgiving.
One day she was there.
The next, she was gone.
After that, it was just my dad and me in a small two-bedroom apartment.
The kind where the radiator clanked in winter and the windows stuck in summer.
We didn’t have much.
But we always had enough.
The heat stayed on.
The lights worked.
There was always food—even if it was just pasta and butter.
Every morning at 4:30, my dad left for work.
He closed the door softly so he wouldn’t wake me.
By the time I went to school, he’d already been lifting other people’s mess for hours.
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