I didn’t speak to him again.
That was eighteen years ago.
I’m thirty-one now, and I own a small heating and cooling company. It’s nothing flashy: twelve employees, six service vans, steady commercial contracts, and a good name with the property managers in three counties. I built it out of a part-time apprenticeship I started at sixteen, crawling through attics for nine dollars an hour.
When I was twenty-two, I needed a loan for my first service van. The bank wouldn’t touch me alone. I had no credit history and no collateral, and my credit score was a number the loan officer wouldn’t even say out loud. Diane drove down to First Federal Savings, sat in that little glass office with me, and co-signed a $38,400 loan without even reading the whole thing. “I already know how it ends,” she told the loan officer. “He pays it back.”
