John B. Allen (MrBallen)

There's this guy named Frank, and he's got two daughters.

He has an older daughter.

This is 1986.

This is in Pepperell, Massachusetts.

So then it's Western Mass.

He's got two daughters.

He's got a 15-year-old daughter named Tina and a 9-year-old daughter named Karen.

And this is in, again, the fall of 86.

And around this time frame, this family, the Bowens family, they had suffered this really awful loss.

So Frank's wife and the two daughters' mother had passed away pretty unexpectedly from cancer.

So it came on suddenly, she passed away, and it was this horrible thing.

And so this has happened within a few months of when this story picks up in the fall of 86.

However, the...

Part of the dynamic here is that the wife, the mother, had been a working mom, and her income had been meaningful to the household.

So the blue-collar family, Frank and his wife's income were how they flowed to the family.

And so when she passed, not only is there all this grief in the household, of course, but there's also a practical issue.

Frank now was 50% of the income is gone and he needs to find a way to provide for his family.

And so in the immediate aftermath of her passing, Frank began taking all these extra shifts at work just to make ends meet.

you know, just sort of what he had to do.

But as a product or a product of that was that Tina and Karen, who were sort of just old enough for this to be okay, they, as they're dealing with this incredible grief of losing their mom, who they were very close with, they began finding themselves alone quite a bit at their house, just alone, putting themselves to bed while their dad is out, you know, taking late shifts at work.