She grabbed two small sacks of pinto beans from the store shelf. She felt a charge travel through her body. A sickening jolt that made her hands tremble. This was definitely not stealing. She was hungry, and that made it different. This was borrowing.

She glanced behind her, then stuffed the borrowed beans into her blouse.

The beans weighed more than she had thought they would. After adjusting the packages in her brassiere, her chest gained five inches on the left side. The lump in her blouse drooped halfway to her waist. She adjusted her renegade bosom, but it kept heading toward the floor.

She walked through the general store with careful steps and an unnatural smile on her face. She was larger than other fifteen-year-olds, and she was embarrassed by this. Her brothers had teased her about it. Her hips were too wide, her chest was too big, and her legs were thick around the ankles. God, in all his cruelty, had seen fit to top her off with a dollop of fire-red hair and freckles that looked like someone had rolled her in confetti.

Her brothers called her “Marigold the Magnificent,” and she hated them for it. They might as well have called her the Great Wall of China. Her size, her skin, her hair were her curses.

“Why don’t you go suck an egg!” she’d often advise her brothers just before she made a serious attempt to fracture important bones in their bodies. Mainly their ribs. Ribs were always a good choice. She almost broke her brother Tom’s foot once by stomping on it. She hadn’t meant to hurt him like that. But he never called her Marigold the Magnificent again.

Marigold had gotten bigger after she gave birth to Maggie. Her hips had become too big for the cotton dresses she wore. Her whole body had changed. In fact, she felt like a stranger in her own skin ever since Father had done the terrible thing he had done to her.

The baby had changed her. She had purple stretch marks on every part of her. When her milk came in, she got even bigger, and it made her feel like she was a household appliance from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

She patted her brassiere, adjusting the beans. This was definitely not stealing. Stealing was what bad people did. She wasn’t bad. When she wasn’t breaking ribs or ankles, she was a good person. Honest, polite, courteous.

Without this food, Marigold would die in the woods, and what would happen to Maggie?