My parents, in all those years?
No birthdays. No art shows. No graduation.
A card at Christmas sometimes, signed in a hand I had to work to recognize.
Mostly, silence.
I stopped waiting for them somewhere around thirteen.
Marcy never once said a bad word about them.
“Hurt people make small choices,” she’d say. “You just make sure you grow up bigger than the smallest thing that ever happened to you.”
So I did.
I poured everything into my art, the one place where being the kid nobody wanted turned into something people couldn’t look away from.
Chapter 3: The Phone Call After the Prize
At twenty-two, I entered a painting in an international competition on a whim and a late-night surge of courage.
I won.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and my work shown in galleries on three continents.
The local paper ran my face on the front page under the headline LOCAL ARTIST, RAISED IN RIVERTON, TAKES WORLD PRIZE.
