• For a few weeks, I slept on friends’ floors.
• A girl from my high school chemistry class let me stay on her futon for nine days, until her stepdad said it was getting to be too much. A coworker from the hardware store let me sleep in her spare room for a week, until her boyfriend came back from a job in Ohio.
• And then I ran out of friends.
• It was late September. I had two hundred and eleven dollars and a job collecting shopping carts and stocking shelves at the Weis Market off Route 309.
• I walked into a Walmart and bought the cheapest tent they had. Thirty-four dollars. A little green two-person dome.
• There was a flea market on the edge of Ridge Hollow, out on the old county road. Open Saturdays and Sundays. Empty the rest of the week. Behind it was a row of rusted storage sheds and a strip of overgrown grass, and behind that, the woods.
• Nobody ever went back there.
• I set my tent up behind the third shed. I tucked it in close to the tree line where nobody could see it from the road.
• For two months, that was my home.
• I washed in the bathroom at the Sunoco station on Route 309 before every shift. Quickly. With the door locked. Hoping nobody would knock. I kept my one clean work shirt sealed inside a plastic grocery bag so it wouldn’t smell like wet grass and mildew.
• I learned that a tent is cold in October. Very cold. I learned to sleep in all of my clothes at once. I learned that rain on a tent sounds like gravel. I learned to eat peanut butter with a plastic spoon straight out of the jar, because bread goes moldy in a tent in four days.
• And one rainy afternoon in early November, I was pushing a long line of shopping carts across the Weis Market parking lot when a car pulled in.
• Mom’s silver Toyota Camry.
• She pulled into a parking spot about thirty feet from me. Mallory was in the passenger seat.
• I stopped pushing the carts.
• Our eyes met through her windshield.
• I was soaked. Rain dripping off the hood of my store-issue rain jacket. My hands were red and raw from the cold metal of the carts.
• Mallory was looking down at her phone, laughing at something.
• Mom looked right at me.
• For three seconds. Maybe four.
• And then she put the car in reverse. And she backed out of that parking spot. And she drove away.
• Slowly.
• Slowly enough for me to understand that she had recognized me. That she’d seen me. Soaking wet in a grocery store parking lot in November.
• And that she’d chosen not to turn around.
• That night, in my tent behind the flea market, I held my prepaid flip phone in my hand for almost an hour.
• Rain was hammering on the nylon over my head. I was wrapped in every piece of clothing I owned. I had Mom’s number pulled up on the little screen. My thumb was right on the green button.
• I didn’t press it.
• Instead, sitting there in the dark, I made myself a promise.
• Someday, I would build a life so stable, so solid, so completely mine, that no one could ever make me feel homeless again.
• Not my mother. Not Mallory. Not anyone.
• Ever.
• The next morning, my day off, I walked into Reed’s Furniture Restoration on Main Street in Ridge Hollow.
• I’d walked past it a hundred times. A narrow brick storefront with a faded green awning and a window full of old chairs. Grandma used to take furniture there when a repair was too big for her garage.
• A bell jingled over the door.
• A man looked up from a workbench in the back. He was about sixty-two, with silver hair sticking up in every direction, thick glasses, and big hands that were stained permanently brown from wood stain and decades of sanding.
• He looked at my worn-out sneakers. He looked at the plastic grocery bag in my hand with my lunch in it.
• “Help you?”
• “Do you need any help?” I said. “In the shop. I’ll do anything. Sweep. Carry things. Whatever you need.”
• His name was Thomas Reed.
• “You ever restore furniture before?” he asked.
• “My grandmother taught me. Elaine Whitaker.”
• Something changed in his face.
• “Elaine,” he said slowly. “Green Buick. Patsy Cline.”
• “Yes, sir.”
• He didn’t say anything else about her. He just pointed toward the corner of the shop, where a big oak dresser was sitting under a work light. One of the drawers was hanging crooked. There was a crack running down the side panel. The finish was cloudy and gray with age.
• “Show me,” he said.
• I spent six hours on that dresser.
• I didn’t eat my lunch. I didn’t sit down. I pulled out the broken drawer runners and cut new ones. I glued the crack and clamped it. I stripped the cloudy old finish with steel wool and mineral spirits, one careful section at a time. I sanded it down by hand, with the grain, the way Grandma taught me. And slowly, the real wood came back up underneath. Golden. Warm. A tiger-stripe grain that had been hiding under eighty years of grime.
• When I finally stepped back, my arms were shaking.
• Thomas walked over. He ran his big stained fingers slowly across the top of the dresser.
• For a long time, he didn’t say anything.
• Then he said, “How much do you need to make to keep coming back here tomorrow?”
• I almost cried right there in the shop.
• Not because he was offering me a job.
• Because he asked me what I needed. Instead of telling me what I deserved.
• Nobody had done that since Grandma died.
• I started working there the next Monday. Eleven dollars an hour. I kept my job at the Weis Market on weekends.
• I swept the floors. I carried lumber in from the truck. I repaired chair rungs and reglued table legs. Thomas taught me how to estimate what a job would cost. How to price materials. How to tell a customer no when they wanted something that couldn’t be done.
• At night, in my tent, I studied business management with a flashlight. Secondhand textbooks I bought for three dollars each at a used bookstore in Allentown.
• In January, I finally got a check in the mail. Forwarded to the shop. From a lawyer’s office in Hazleton. Grandma Elaine’s estate had finally gone through probate. Fourteen months after she died, it had cleared. She’d left me a gift. A small one. Six thousand dollars, and a sealed letter I didn’t open for a very long time.
• I used part of it to start my classes at community college.
• And I used part of it for the security deposit on a room.
• It was a tiny room on the second floor of an old building on Chestnut Street, right above a laundromat. Two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month. The ceiling leaked whenever it rained. The only window looked out at a brick wall about four feet away. The floor vibrated when the industrial dryers ran downstairs.
• But I had a key.
• That first night, I locked that door three times. Then I checked it. Then I locked it again.
• Then I sat down on the bare floor with my back against the door, and I cried until the sun came up.
• I wasn’t crying because my life was hard.
• I was crying because, for the first time since I was nineteen years old, nobody could throw me out of my own room.
• I never called my mother.
• I never called Mallory.
• And they never called me, either. Not once.
• I found out years later, from a cousin, what they’d been telling people. Mom told everyone in the family that I’d gotten selfish and abandoned my pregnant sister when she needed me most. Mallory told people I’d always been jealous of her. That I’d stormed out because I couldn’t handle her being happy.
• I let them tell whatever story helped them sleep at night.
• I had work to do.
• Mallory had her baby that spring. A little girl. They named her Sophie. I found out from a Facebook post a friend showed me. I looked at that picture for a long time. Then I went back to work.
• Three years later, Thomas Reed decided to retire.
• His wife, Margaret, had gotten sick, and he wanted to take care of her. He called me into his little back office one Friday afternoon and sat me down across his cluttered desk.
• “I want to sell you the shop, Paige.”
• I laughed. “Thomas. I have eight hundred dollars in my checking account.”
• “I know. That’s why we’re going to do it the slow way.”
• He’d already talked to his accountant and his lawyer. It was called seller financing. Instead of me going to a bank, which would never have given a twenty-two-year-old with a community college degree a business loan, Thomas would be the bank. I’d pay him a small down payment, then monthly payments over seven years, with interest, out of the shop’s profits. His lawyer drew up a promissory note and a sales agreement. I took it to a lawyer of my own, a free one at the county’s small business development center, who went over every single line with me.
• The shop wasn’t glamorous.
• The roof needed repairs. Two of the machines were older than I was. The back office smelled like damp cardboard and old coffee.
• But it had something I had never owned before in my life.
• A future I could build myself.
• I signed those papers on Thomas’s desk with my hands shaking so badly my signature looked like a seismograph.
• Thomas shook my hand when it was done.
• “Your grandmother would be very proud of you,” he said.
• I made every single payment to Thomas, on time, for seven years. I paid off the note eleven months early.
• 

         >>PART 3