At my high school graduation party, Dad told me there was no money for college because “school was always harder” for me—while my 16-year-old sister had a new Jeep and $60,000 in her college fund. I already had a college acceptance letter in my pocket, but he wouldn’t even complete the financial-aid form. When I packed to move in with the uncle he called “the family loser,” Dad stood in the hallway and said, “You’ll be back by the Fourth of July.”

I said no, Mom. She hung up. I didn’t hear from her again for a long time. Here’s what you have to understand about the business. People hear pumping and portable toilets and they make a face. My dad made that face for 30 years, but that’s not what the job is. The job is trucks and timing.

You deliver 40 units to a construction site by 6:00 in the morning so the crew never has to think about it. You set up 20 units at a church picnic before the first lawn chair comes out. You service the route on schedule every time so nobody ever calls the office to complain. Hoyt’s whole philosophy fit on a sticky note.

He had it on the dash of his truck in his own handwriting. Be there before they need you. Nobody ever thanks you in this business. He told me my first week. That’s how you know you did it right. The day somebody notices you is the day you messed up. I worked the route Monday, Wednesday, and Friday plus Saturdays all summer.

In August, I started at central Missouri. Warrensburg is about an hour north of Warsaw. So I drove up Tuesdays and Thursdays in a beat up work truck Hoyt let me use and took the rest of my classes at night online. The money part took some doing without Dad’s half of the form. The financial aid office said there was nothing they could do.

Then a lady named Mrs. Albright took pity on me. She said there was one thing. If I could prove my parents had cut me off and weren’t supporting me, she could approve a small student loan in my name only. Not much, just a few thousand a year, but something. So, Hoyt sat down at his kitchen table upstairs and wrote a letter in his slow, careful handwriting, saying that I lived with him, worked for him, and hadn’t gotten a dollar from my parents since the night of my graduation.

He signed it. Marva notarized nothing because she’s not a notary, but she typed it up so it looked official, and Mrs. Albright said that would do. Then, Hoyt said something I didn’t expect. Company pays part of school for anybody who works here. Marva looked up from her desk. Since when? Since today. Hoyt, there’s one employee.

Then it won’t cost much. It costs more than it should have for a company with one truck. Marva said it was a write-off. Later, I found out a write-off doesn’t mean free, and Hoyt went without a new transmission for his own truck that year so he could cover my tuition. He never mentioned it.

Marva did years later. Between the elevator money, the small loan, and what the company paid, I made it through the first year without a single dollar from home. And the whole first year, nobody from home asked how I was doing. Not one time. The idea that changed everything came from a bride’s mother.

Summer after my first year, we set up portable units at a barn wedding outside Lincoln. The mother of the bride walked out, looked at our blue units in the grass, and said, “Oh, I was hoping for the nice kind.” I asked her what she meant. She meant a restroom trailer. If you’ve never seen one, picture a little white trailer with steps up to a door and inside it’s like the bathroom at a nice restaurant.

Flush toilets, sinks with running water, mirrors, lights, air conditioning, the kind of thing you’d see at a fancy wedding or a golf tournament. She told me the nearest company that rented them was up in Columbia and they were booked every weekend through October. She’d called in January. I went home and looked it up.

She was right. There was one company in Columbia and one down by Springfield, and both were booked solid all summer. They rented for over $1,000 a weekend, and there was nobody, not one company in the lake area or anywhere around Sedalia. I filled two pages of a notebook that night. In the morning, I put it in front of Hoyt at the shop.

He read it twice. Then he took his glasses off. You want me to borrow money for fancy toilets? I want you to borrow money for one fancy toilet. A used one. Two stalls, a sink, air conditioning. There’s one for sale in Kansas City for $38,000. If we book it 12 weekends a year, it pays for itself in a year and a half.