I imagined my mother, in her church clothes, greeting Graham. He’d tower over her bony five-foot-two-inch frame. She wasn’t allowed heels and got skinnier and skinnier with each child, like all her excess anything went into us from birth. Her forehead was creased with years of worry, her crow’s feet deep from a lifetime of planting in the sun. She always had dirty hands and soil-filled nails, except on Sundays. She’d stand at the kitchen sink, yelling for us to hurry up, while scrubbing her skin raw with a brittle brush. She kept a tin of O’Keeffe’s in her nightstand, always working it into her hands and elbows to try to undo the damage.

I think, on the surface, she’d be disappointed in my relationship; marrying an agnostic banker, living with him in sin, taking birth control so I could fuck him whenever I wanted. More than that, I think she’d hate that I’d become dependent on Graham—his money, his family, his success. I didn’t need him, but as far as this life went, the life I’d gotten used to, the second he was gone, it was gone—the roof over my head, the clothes on my back, any kind of security I felt. Right now, he and his money served all my basic needs. That was part of the plan, of course, but as far as appearances went, she’d be unimpressed I couldn’t live this life myself.

My parents met at a church singles’ night, got married in a joyous ceremony with a dry after-party at my grandparents’ farm. My mother even had a job for a brief period in the beginning—a secretary at the elementary school in town. That is, until she got pregnant and it was deemed inappropriate for a pregnant married woman to work; until they had moved hours away from her family, from town, from any kind of normalcy, because he found a good deal on an expansive Christmas tree farm near a church far more extreme than the one my mother had grown up in. Until he was in control of her money, her chores, her reproductive system. Until she became them and my mother turned from Grace into the woman I knew. Into someone’s wife.

But under those layers of fear, so deep-seated I’m not sure anyone would be able to exhume it, I think she’d be proud of me. For doing what she said. For taking the scariest leap and leaving them and the farm. For getting an education and a job that pays more money than my parents have ever seen. For reading whatever books and wearing whatever clothes and doing whatever activities—not only because I could afford it but because I had freedom. I had autonomy. I had everything.

I think that would thrill her.