Is love really all you need?
I don’t exactly know where my responsibility starts and ends, and maybe I have no responsibility here at all. What do I tell a 20-year-old? Would she listen? Would anything I might have said made any difference in the long run? Could I have been wrong in the first place? You be the reader and the judge.
In the first place, this was not my child. In the second place, this was not my culture. We’re talking The South — true, not the Deep South, but Southeast Missouri, the beginning of the south. Here you are on the northern cusp of the true South — where you begin to find fried chicken gizzards in the drive-through chicken places, sweet tea in all the restaurants, and when people often marry when they’re 18, and most don’t even bat an eye and no one automatically assumes anyone is pregnant.
“Look at her,” nods my friend, who is a bit of Southern Belle, who’s near to my age, “She’s in love.”
Yes, I thought she (disturbingly) was in love. She was grinning from ear to the other ear so hard her eyes were tiny slits. Luella (not her real name) was 20 years old, and the youngest daughter of an old family friend. Her older brother and sister were already married, her oldest sister married at 18, having given birth for the first time two days ago, at the age of 22.
