She also had, from a fairly early age, a complicated relationship with where she came from.
This is the part that is hard to describe fairly, because I was the person she was coming from, and so my perspective is not neutral. What I can say is that I noticed, when she was in high school, a particular kind of embarrassment when I would meet her friends’ parents. A stiffness. A tendency to answer questions about my job with brevity and to move conversations in other directions. I am a kitchen supervisor at a hospital, which is honest work that I value, but it is not the kind of job that draws attention at the sort of dinner parties that some of Hartfield’s more aspirational families hosted.
I noticed and I did not make a large thing of it. Teenagers are embarrassed by their parents; this is an old story. Carl noticed too and felt it more sharply than I did, which was its own difficulty, but he loved Paige without condition and she knew it and their relationship was warm even when complicated.
She went to state university on a combination of scholarships and loans and emerged four years later with a degree in communications and, it became clear, a strong desire to build a life that did not look like the life she had grown up in. I respected this on some level. Wanting more than your parents had is not a failing. It is, often, the thing that drives people to do meaningful work.