I drove to Deana’s pint-sized Texas hometown with my thumb looking like a used tampon. I wanted to get a flavor for Deana’s little Ellis Island, but I had to deal with my injury first. Across from the central square—a fixture of seemingly every Texas small town—was a pharmacy that billed itself as “old fashioned.” Unable to ignore the agony in my hand any longer, I parked my Volkswagen and went inside. A sales clerk immediately greeted me, then emerged from behind the counter to personally show me the “Advil section” and “the Tylenol section,” which appeared to be the same section. When I held my oozing thumb out to her, she called over the pharmacist, a middle-aged blond woman. “Bless your heart,” the pharmacist said, poking it with a pen.

“I picked my skin,” I said.

“I would do the same thing if I didn’t have these,” she said. She held out her flawless, pink-painted nails. The fact that she was willing to pretend to be a crazy skin picker for my benefit made me feel so good I almost forgot my thumb pain.

“You better take you some Aleve,” the pharmacist said. I grabbed some from the Aleve section.

There it was: the charming, extreme involvement in other people’s lives that so far I’ve only encountered in the American South. This was the only time a pharmacist has willingly interacted with me since I moved to Washington for college. I’ve seen homeless people wailing in agony on the D.C. Metro, and passersby reacting by cranking up the volume on their noise-canceling headphones. When I go home to visit, I now find human connection refreshingly soothing, like a homeopathic elixir. People giving a shit about each other! I think to myself. I’ll be darned!

But, if you’re not used to it, having people insert themselves into your day can be overwhelming. (Indeed, the charm wore off slightly when I went to a Chipotle in a nearby town and the cashier interrogated me about my last name.) And extreme neighborliness definitely wasn’t the way of the U.S.S.R. Deana was unaccustomed to this kind of probing, and she found it unpleasant. Some of the town’s 4,500 inhabitants seemed, to her, to be too nosy and judgmental. People would walk up and ask if she believed in Jesus. Anyone who heard her speak would ask where she was from and how she got there. Admitting that her mother was a mail-order bride only heaped stigma on Deana, who already felt conspicuous. Once, she told someone her origin story, and he simply laughed, shook his head, and said she must be kidding. That was the last time she mentioned it for a while.