To ease my loneliness during the day while everyone else was gone from the house, I would spend hours on the phone with Mike. Since he was now a short haul trucker and had a blu-tooth, we could talk as much as we wanted without interfering with his job.
     He was still living down in Salem with his wife, so he couldn't visit, but he could talk to me, and talk he did. He really took one for the team, since most of the time I wasn't always the most cognitive with the combination of drugs I was taking, often sad, and sometimes weepy, but he hung in there for me.
     Every morning, after the kids left for school, I would call him, and without fail he would always answer, cheerfully. Even if he was rolling his eyes at yet another conve...

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