Some Must Pay

Most families know what it feels like to say yes to something they can't quite afford?because it was for the children, because the budget was already tight, because someone made waiting sound worse than buying.

It is 1952. Norma Watts is home alone with two children under three and a mortgage her husband's railroad paycheck barely covers. When Roy Garland knocks on the door with his encyclopedia pitch?built around every mother's weak spot, her children's future?she signs. The three-hundred-and-fifty-four-dollar total is in the small print. She finds it later.

What follows is a story every family will recognize: the quiet scramble to cover what you committed to, the cheaper cut of meat on Fridays, the column added to the household notebook, the conversation with your husband you weren't sure how to start. Families absorb these blows. They find a way. They don't say much about it out loud.

And the books come, month after month. By the time Norma's daughter is ten, she reads them for pleasure?on the floor, back against the couch, disappeared into something her mother paid for in hard, fourteen-dollar installments.

Some Must Pay is for anyone who has ever done the math at the kitchen table and decided to find a way anyway. Quiet, honest, and deeply human?it doesn't ask for your sympathy. It earns your recognition.