Staring at the thirteen dollars and eighteen cents on the table, Gemma Ellis pushed the pennies around in a circle.

“Thirteen bucks,” she murmured. It was Tuesday, which meant four days until payday. The fridge wasn’t bare, but it wasn’t robustly stocked either. Dash had needed new shoes and her trip to the thrift store didn’t turn anything up, so her little guy got a brand spanking new pair. The hit to her checking account hurt.

Friday was payday. It might not seem like a long time to wait, but as she mentally calculated the food in the cupboard, it seemed years away. She knew she needed enough gas to get to work. Her crappy rusted-out Toyota, although ugly, got decent gas mileage. Gemma had run the tank down to empty enough to know just what she could squeeze out of the poor car.

Stretching the food in the fridge wasn’t impossible. Her little man liked rice. Dashiell was the world’s easiest four-year-old. It was like he saw the big picture of the world around him and knew the one he and his mom lived in was a bit different. He rarely whined, never threw fits, and always ate what was given to him.

Gemma made sure her little guy ate healthy no matter what. She’d go hungry if it meant he’d have a balanced meal.

Glancing at the calendar on the wall, she saw that the church’s food bank was open Wednesdays. That was tomorrow; she could squeeze in the trip after work at the diner – she could do this. Gas in the car to get to both of her jobs. Pick up a few things from the store. Milk and eggs she could get from her second job at the gas station where the owner, Mr. Leary, gave her an employee discount on food. She was pretty sure no one else got the discount, but she was grateful for it.

Her main job waitressing at the local truck stop just outside town, The Pump and Munch, was where she pretended to be someone else. It wasn’t that she was a liar by any means. She just didn’t share anything about herself. She worked around a lot of men – most of them nice – but she still didn’t feel comfortable sharing her life story with a bunch of truckers.

Picking up a penny and giving it a spin, Gemma watched it turn as she pondered whether her life was better now or worse than before she moved. It had been just over half a year since she’d chosen to uproot her son from the only life he’d ever known. Aside from her ex and her parents, there wasn’t any support system left behind. Nobody to rely on. She figured she’d do better on her own.

Gemma was an excellent penny pincher. She had to learn the skill a long time ago. Growing up her parents had been…less than enthusiastic about keeping jobs. She’d grown up wearing hand-me-down clothes from donation bins at local churches. Rent and food came from welfare checks and food stamps whenever her parents couldn’t or wouldn’t work. It kept them in a home and fed most of the time. When she was a kid, she hated that her life revolved around the beginning of the month when it was like Christmas. Tons of food, maybe even some toys. From the middle to the end of the month, money was thin and life was miserable.

As an adult, Gemma realized her parents weren’t bad people, they just never quite got along with others. They never liked their jobs and always hated their bosses and were generally disgruntled with life. This was not the kind of attitude that kept a person employed. In fact, it was a huge factor in Gemma deciding as a young child to learn to get along with people.

Gemma didn’t want to live that way. She wanted more. Not crazy lottery-money living, just normal paycheck to paycheck living. That was her goal: to have money left in her account on payday. Even change would do. It would mean her life was different; she could provide a good example for her son and hopefully, show him a better way to live.

When Gemma split from her ex-husband, she swore she would make it on her own. Kyle had originally seemed like her ticket out of her less-than-ideal life. They met in high school, and he played football. He wasn’t the quarterback – that guy was totally out of her league – but he was a popular wide receiver who wore a letterman jacket that made him look like a teenage dream. Gemma wasn’t quite in the same circle as him. In truth, she wasn’t in any circle.

With her home life so erratic, she had made it her goal to blend in. She was a decent student, and her teachers talked to her about scholarship opportunities and such. Gemma wasn’t an athlete, but she was a serious volunteer.

Signs needed for the football team? She was there. Someone needed to man a table selling buttons for a fundraiser? Just ask Gemma. So although not necessarily in the circle, she hovered on the outskirts. In high school, she was pretty, curvy, and had a rack that most of her classmates envied.

Gemma thought her crappy life had finally taken a right turn when Kyle Ellis noticed her.

Kyle was handsome. He was terrible in school, but they overlooked that because he played ball. He even had his own car and a job his senior year. To Gemma, he was a Rockefeller. He treated her like she was a princess, or, at least, her warped idea of one. She loved getting picked up in his black four wheel truck that he kept clean and shiny; everyone would stop and stare as it rumbled at the curb. Finally, they were looking at her – not because she was shabby and white trash, but because she was with a football player.

She knew they thought she was putting out and that was why he liked her, and it was partly true. She was a year behind him, and he dated her through her senior year. This – to Gemma – seemed a declaration of true love. He was willing to wait for her. It had to mean they were destined to be together forever. Right?

Over that year, Kyle would take her out to the Tasty Freeze. He always paid. He had moved out of his parents’ house and into an apartment he shared with a buddy. Gemma spent many a night over at his place, her parents not giving a shit if she came home.

That Christmas, he bought her a necklace with her birthstone in it. True, it turned her neck green, but she loved it and wore it proudly.

Gemma planned on her senior year being the best year of her life. And it was – most of it. Kyle convinced her that dropping out was okay since he’d be taking care of her forever. She could live with him, and they would get married. It was exactly what Gemma needed to hear one night after her dad and mom lit into her, calling her a tramp and a whore. They were both drunk, which wasn’t uncommon. Typically they barely noticed her coming and going, but that night they were wretched. Gemma had called Kyle crying, telling him she couldn’t stay at home any longer.

He offered to rescue her.

To a seventeen-year-old girl who hated school, this sounded like a freaking brilliant plan. Why stick around for a diploma when you could start playing house right away?

So she dropped out with just a few months left of her last year of high school, but it turned out that Kyle didn’t like having to pick her up all the time. It cut into his time hanging with the boys, which was what Kyle did any time he wasn’t working in a friend’s auto body shop.

Gemma thought life would be different living with her boyfriend. It wasn’t. When she got pissed at him for all the hours she spent working nights at a local diner to make ends meet, he proposed. Later Gemma realized he’d probably been waiting to lock her down and was waiting for her to be legal. A beat down girl of eighteen was not the best judge of intentions; Gemma thought he loved her, but in truth, he probably just wanted to shut her up.

Why she thought marriage would make anything better is a mystery. She enthusiastically said yes, and they got married in the courthouse. She wore an off-white prom dress she found at the local thrift store. She felt pretty, her waist-length dark brown hair curled. Her mother, who had reconciled with her now that she’d gotten her man, had brought some baby’s breath and tucked it into her hair when they met her at the courthouse.

It wasn’t a bad day. It felt nice to be the center of attention, and to have her whole future ahead of her was the most exciting thing that ever happened. After the wedding – if you could even call it such – it was back to the same old routine. She kept her job at the diner, and Kyle worked when he wasn’t passed out drunk on the couch.

The first year and a half after they got married there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. She worked, Kyle worked sometimes, and they existed. Then she came down with the flu and it screwed up her birth control. At first, she was devastated. She had no clue how they were going to manage a baby and their shitty lives.

Working through her pregnancy, Gemma truly found out who she was. She was so much stronger than she could have imagined. She also realized that she couldn’t rely on anyone but herself. She was the one that was going to show her child how to make a change in your life, no matter what you were born into.