My grandma spent $30,000 to join our family’s Europe trip. But at the airport, my dad said, ‘I forgot your ticket—just go home.’ The way everyone avoided her eyes told me it wasn’t an accident. I stayed with her. Three weeks later, my parents came back—and the whole family froze, like they were holding their breath, when they saw me standing beside a man. Because…

There was only one place I ever felt truly alive. One place where the air itself felt like a hug.

My grandmother’s house in Tuloma, Tennessee.

Every summer, my parents put me on a Greyhound bus or drove me up I-26 and I-40, past billboards and truck stops and green highway signs, to drop me at her small wooden house on the edge of town.

Continued on next page:Those summers were the best months of my childhood.

My grandmother, Hazel, was petite but strong, tough in the way only women who’ve worked nights in hospitals and raised children alone ever really are. She’d been a nurse at the local hospital—working double shifts, grabbing naps in on-call rooms, living on vending machine coffee and whatever she could pack in a brown paper bag. She divorced when my father was still young and raised him and his sister, my Aunt Paula, almost entirely on her own.