She reads the Bible every morning. She also smokes off-brand cigarettes. To a lifelong Methodist like her, the two go hand in hand.
She’s eighty-four and frail. She digs a cigarette from a carton, her daughter lights it. The doctor says she shouldn’t smoke, but the Good Lord understands.
She tells a story.
“After my husband left us,” she begins, “I was raising my kids, doing all I could to survive. He left me with eighteen bucks in our bank account—no lie.”
Then, the worst. One day, she walked into work and her boss fired her.
Instead of crying, she lost her temper. She attacked him. She threw a lunch bucket at him. She landed several good slaps to his face. Her friends pulled her away.
This woman is a regular barrel of gunpowder.
That night, she loaded her children into a station wagon and drove straight for her sister’s in South Carolina. Radio blasting. Cigarettes burning.
“I was crying,” she says. “And worried about everything, I was sick.”
Her car broke down somewhere outside Athens, Georgia. Two in the morning. An empty highway. Not a soul for miles.
Her station wagon sat in a ditch. Her children were in the backseat, asleep. She leaned against her steering wheel and the tears came.
This was rock bottom.
Her sobbing was interrupted by the sound of transfer truck brakes. A big rig pulled behind her. Earth-shaking engine. Headlights blaring.
A man stepped out of the cab and walked toward her.
“I was scared,” she says. “Here I was, a young woman, middle of nowhere, and this man comes walking up.”
He was tall. She remembers this very clearly. And older.
He asked if she needed help. She told him what had happened, using a nervous voice.
His smile put her at ease. He said, “Pop the hood, ma’am. Lemme…