“Grandpa, can I get new jeans? Everyone at school has these branded ones.”
“We can’t afford that, kiddo.”
That was his answer to everything. I hated that sentence more than anything. While my friends wore trendy clothes and carried new phones, I had hand-me-downs and a phone older than I was.
I cried into my pillow at night—ashamed of resenting him, but still angry. He promised I could be anything, yet it always felt like money held us by the throat.
Then Grandpa got sick, and all that anger vanished, replaced with fear so heavy it sat on my chest.
He couldn’t walk upstairs without gasping. We couldn’t afford a nurse—of course we couldn’t—so I cared for him myself while finishing my last semester of high school.
“I’ll be fine, kiddo. Just a cold,” he’d say.
Liar, I thought, terrified of losing him.
One night, as I helped him back to bed, he looked at me with a strange intensity. “Mia, I need to tell you something.”
“Later, Grandpa. You need to rest.”
But later never came.
He died in his sleep.