Chapter2

Dale squirmed in the passenger seat. “Nellie, I said all the wrong things in there. I embarrassed you.”

My eyes stung. I wiped them fast. “No, Dale. You said everything right.”

I’m not someone who cries in front of people. Freshman year, I worked three jobs at once just to keep up appearances. Sophomore year, after that video took off, I started taking my account seriously. Junior year, I opened a little Etsy shop selling dried fruit for the farmers in our town and the towns around it.

In all those years, people called me a climber and a gold digger, and I never once cried.

What I couldn’t stand was watching the people I love get treated like that.

In the back seat, Grandma was quietly wiping her eyes, trying to hide it while she lectured me. “You shouldn’t have talked back to your future mother-in-law like that. Now that it’s come to this, what if she has it out for you from here on?”

That was when the tears came. “So what was I supposed to do? Sit there and watch her walk all over you?”

“She said a few things about me. So what? It won’t kill me.” Seeing me cry set her off too. “You love that boy so much, and his mother’s a hard woman. Are you just going to walk away from him?”

Dale fumbled for tissues and passed them back. “She’s just looking out for you…”

Grandma kept wiping her face, full of guilt. “It’s my fault. I had to go and bring all that stuff. People like that have seen everything. All I did was make trouble for you.”

“Stop.” I cut her off. My chest was tight.

I got out, went around to the back seat, and wrapped my arms around her. “Grandma, I don’t care how great he is. He’ll never matter more than the woman who raised me.”

I wasn’t a sweet kid. I grew up poor with way too much pride. I hated that my clothes were always secondhand, most of them from the church thrift store.

Kids are experts at sizing each other up, and there were always boys who knocked my backpack to the ground on purpose. I’d mouth off, but I never threw a punch. We couldn’t afford the doctor’s bill.

One day I came home with my head hanging. The next morning, Grandma went to the school to tell my teacher about the bullying, and she brought along a basket of cantaloupes from our garden.

The teacher didn’t even look at the basket. A melon rolled out, and she dropped it straight into the trash. She said she only ate organic.

I happened to walk in to turn in my homework and saw the whole thing. My face burned. When we got home, I screamed at Grandma that she’d humiliated me. Then I locked myself in my room and refused to eat for two days.

Grandma didn’t fight with me. On the third morning, before sunrise, she set a bowl of oatmeal by my bed and left to pick beans in a neighbor’s field for a few dollars an hour.

I pressed my face to the window and watched her inch down the rows, bent nearly double, so small she looked like a bean herself. I cried the whole time I ate that oatmeal.

I wiped the tears off Grandma’s face and got back behind the wheel. “Come on. Let’s go home and make a big pot of chicken noodle soup.”