And she said: “Dad, how bad does debt have to be before it’s actually bad?”
And I said something about how everybody goes through tight spots. I said something about how your mother and I ate an awful lot of beans in 1987. I gave her a little speech about getting your head down and working it off.
What I did not do is ask her a number.
If I had asked her a number, she would have said two hundred and eleven thousand dollars, and everything after that is a different story — a bad one, a hard one, bankruptcy and shame and probably losing her house, but a story with my daughter alive in it and her mother alive in it and her child in a coat that fit.
I gave a woman in real trouble a motivational speech because asking the actual question would have meant finding out something I didn’t want to know about my own kid.
