My name is Jack Fulton. I am eighteen years old and the son of a sanitation worker. My mother, Denise, spent eleven years on the back of a city garbage truck. People said that job suited her because she was always tough, but they did not know the truth. She had studied to become a radiology technician before her fiancé, my father, fell from a faulty scaffolding at a housing development and never came home. The bills swallowed her dreams. The city job saved our apartment, but it cost her the life she once imagined.