An excerpt from Ch. 3 of Never Settled: a memoir of a boy on the road to manhood by Shawn D. Congleton

“You really think your mom will let me live in the garage?” I asked Steve.

“Sure! We’ll talk her into it. She loves you Cong! She’ll let you do anything. She even lets you drive our car and she literally won’t let me! Once we tell her why, she’ll definitely let you,” Steve explained.

“I would love to fix this place up. We could move all of this storage and junk over to the side and then put a bed in there and fix up that old stereo. This will be so great! Like my own apartment!”

“Let’s do it now! We’ll surprise her!” Steve encouraged.

My dad was talking about moving again. I was done. I hadn’t told him yet; but if they moved, I was staying. We had lived in Byers for just over a year. This was the longest I had ever gone to one school. A year was our longest stay in one house, my entire life. I’m not really sure why he wanted to move again, but he said we were. Now that I was in high school, I didn’t want to move again. In elementary, and even junior high, it wasn’t really that big of a deal. Looking back, I liked the changes and the prospect of something always being better than where we were.