The Weight Of Small Hands

In a house with two rooms in a small town in southern Luzon, six-year-old Esther Kai learns to hold her baby brother on her hip before she's old enough to understand why. It's the first of many things life will ask her to carry.Her story moves from a tin rooftop, where she taught herself to read the sky with a single chipped lens, through a marriage chosen for safety instead of love, through the quiet unraveling that follows her father's death and a family that suddenly needs someone solid to lean on. It follows her across an ocean, through nineteen years spent inside other people's houses and other people's children's lives, and back home again - to a college classroom at forty-six, a teacher's license at fifty, and a business built from nothing but the discipline of a girl who never stopped believing the sky belonged to her too.The Weight of Small Hands is a story about the cost of being the one everyone leans on - and about discovering, decades later than anyone tells you it's allowed, that it is never too late to stand up straight.