Under the Bill: A True Account of Life at the Bottom in America

Daniel lives in an American county seat that still looks as if it is running. After his divorce, he has to be a father in two separate homes at once. He takes night shifts, fixes an old car, keeps up with insurance payments, pays for medicine, monitors his son's asthma and his daughter's college applications, and waits for a tax refund that never arrives before the deadline.

None of these problems seems like much on its own. But when shrinking paychecks, white envelopes, emergency-room bills, school lunch accounts, financial-aid forms, adjustments to shared custody, and ever-rising copays all pile up, life leaves him with just one way to choose: what to save first, and what to give up first.