I first met Oliver when I was fifteen. It was evening, and I had been playing baseball in the city park with some of the boys I knew from school. My house was on the east side of the park, on Whitney Street. Everyone else lived on the west side, on streets not far from the hospital, where my mom worked part time as a nurse’s aide. She hated that job. My dad wanted her to quit, but we needed the money. Dad worked for the county, driving heavy equipment that jarred his guts and made his ears ring. On the evenings Mom worked, he’d skip supper and drink beer until he fell asleep in his chair in front of the TV. While he snored through the sitcoms, I gathered up the empty cans and put them out in the garage in a big cardboard box. It was quite a collection. Every few weeks, we’d take in the cans to get the deposit, and came home smelling like a brewery.