I'm the Glue: The Year Everything Broke, and I Held It Together Anyway

By Topher Rent

"Folks look at a night like this and think it's a sad picture... It don't feel that way from in here."

In one stretch of weeks, Cole Merrick buried the father he'd rescued from a nursing home, lost the two incomes that died with him, and watched his last running truck die of a cracked block - with the storage meter running. The lawyers came. The courts couldn't help. Bankruptcy turned him away for being too poor to qualify.

What was left: five acres in the Arkansas pines, a wife who ends every call "love you bad," a yard full of animals somebody's got to feed, one fast laptop - and a man who's spent his whole life being the glue.

I'm the Glue is the funny, faithful, dead-honest story of a year at the bottom: porch cash drops and gentle-turn routes, grass money and garlic dog food, four apps at once at one in the morning, and a to-do list with "water the garden" and "rebuke the depression and satan" in the same size letters. It's about the web of broke people who hold each other up when the systems won't - and what a man finally hears when the sermon names him out loud.

Glue don't sign its work. But it holds.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9BTTLZ6
• ISBN13: 9798187507436
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"