But that little girl has never once complained.
Not when her sneakers got so tight her toes curled. Not when we ate peanut butter sandwiches for dinner four nights in a row at the end of the month. Not when her friends all went to the water park for a birthday party and I couldn’t afford the twenty-dollar admission.
“That’s okay, Grandma,” she said. “I don’t really like water parks anyway.”
She loves water parks.
She is my sunshine. She’s the only reason I get out of bed some mornings.
Last Friday, we stopped at Walmart for milk and bread.
It was the twenty-eighth of the month. The worst time. Social Security doesn’t come till the third. I had eleven dollars and forty cents in my wallet and a list on the back of an envelope. Milk. Bread. Peanut butter. Bananas if cheap.
I was standing in the bread aisle comparing prices. The store brand was a dollar twenty-nine. The good kind, the soft kind Ellie likes, was two eighty-nine. I was doing the math in my head. If I got the store brand, I could get bananas.
