I wonder what set her off this time. It could have been something the man in the leather jacket said. It’s as if she hears things at a different frequency, the way a dog picks up sounds the rest of us miss. Or maybe she hears something that isn’t really there at all. Either way, when she’s ready to go, there is no arguing. There is only leaving.
I don’t have many clothes; the ones I’m wearing and a couple of T-shirts, including the one I’m holding. The one that declares me a member of the Waynesville High School track team. I’ve never been to Waynesville. I’ve never been to high school. The only thing this T-shirt and I have in common is the running. I throw it in the trash. The next place always has a thrift store filled with T-shirts that will transform me into a soccer player or a Cowboys fan or someone who’s attended the Jenkins-Carter family reunion.
My books take up the most space in my suitcase. The binding is starting to come apart on the math textbook I bought for a quarter at a Friends of the Library sale. It was printed in 1959, but I love that it’s still relevant, that math is a constant in a world that is not. It worries me that the book might not make it through another move. I pack the dog-eared copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the atlas of world history I stole from a bookstore’s sidewalk sale, my garage-sale copy of Walden, and my favorite novel in the world—a kids’ book called Mandy, about a little orphan girl who wants more than anything to have a home and a family. I’ve read it so many times the pages are falling out, but I can’t leave it behind. I can’t leave any of my books behind. They’re the only friends I’ve ever really had.
“Two minutes,” Mom calls from the bedroom.
We’re leaving: a sink full of dirty dishes, the old television we found on the curb in front of someone’s house, a vinyl couch that stuck to my face when my head slipped off my pillow, and that stupid noisy clock she bought because it reminded her of the one in her grandparents’ house when she was a little girl. We’re even skipping out a month behind on our month-to-month rent.
We usually live in buildings like this one. Our side of town is usually the rough side, where they don’t ask for references or deposits. Where, when you move away in the middle of the night, they shake their heads and cut their losses. Once we squatted in the model home of a development that was never completed. We’ve lived in a couple of long-term efficiency motels. And another time we “borrowed” a house that belonged to Leo and Dotty Ruskin, an elderly couple who spent their winters in the dry heat of Arizona. I’ve always wondered if they felt like the Three Bears when they returned. Did they feel violated for a while, locking doors they don’t normally lock until they felt safe again? Sometimes I still feel a little guilty about that, but it was nice to sleep in a real guest room. I made the beds and washed all our dishes before we left. I hope that makes up for Mom cleaning out the tin of spare change they kept in their closet.
My curls are tangled and oily as I scrape them into a ponytail. I wish I had time to take a shower. Wish we didn’t have to leave. I have no sentimental attachment to this town. No job. No school spirit. No boyfriend unless you count Danny, which I don’t because he already has a girlfriend. But I still wish we could stay here—or anywhere. Put down roots. Live. “I don’t want to do this.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Mom calls from her bedroom.
I blink, startled that she can read my mind. Then I realize I’ve said it aloud. Now she’s going to be mad at me again.
“You’re my daughter,” she snaps, heading out the front door. “Where I go, you go. And I’m going in one minute.”
I tuck spare underwear—which I refuse to buy in thrift stores—into the empty spaces of my suitcase. My blue toothbrush. My journal, so thick with notes, stories, poems, and postcards I’ve collected over the years that I keep a wide pink rubber band around it to hold in the pages. Most of my life is recorded in this book, starting from when I first learned to write in crooked letters. Most. Because there are some secrets you don’t even want to tell yourself.
My minute is up when I hear a beep from the old battleship-gray Toyota Corona that my mother bought from a junkyard with her bartender tips. I zip up my suitcase, blow out a tired breath, and touch my jeans pocket, feeling for the bump of the evil eye bead. The Toyota beeps again, telegraphing Mom’s impatience.
The last thing I do is put away my guitar, an old rosewood and spruce Martin with a mahogany neck. Mom bought it in a pawnshop in Omaha. A Christmas present when I was eleven. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen a guitar before, but as she flirted with the guy behind the counter, trying to get him to raise his offer on a ring she was selling, I fell in love with the Martin. She didn’t get the extra cash she was after, but he threw in the guitar. Mom said maybe I’d be the next Courtney Love. I didn’t tell her that on one of the pages in my journal I’d written “I hate Courtney Love” over and over until the page was covered. My feelings aren’t so strong about her now as they were back then, but that was before her Hole cassette finally came unraveled. Anyway, my Martin is a war zone of scratches and finish cracks, but the sound is still as rich and resonant as if it were new.
“Ready to go?” she asks, as I get in the car. She tries to light up a smoke, but her hands are shaking. That troubles me in a way I can’t identify. I take the cigarette from between her lips, light it, grab a quick drag, and hand it back. She flashes a smile, and for a split second I see the girl she used to be. The girl who held my hand as we walked to the bus stop on the first day of kindergarten. She was impossibly beautiful then, with her platinum pixie hair and bare legs ending in battered Doc Martens. People stared at her, and my heart felt too big for my chest because she was my mom. We reached the stop, and she perched on the back of the bus bench while we waited, smoking a cigarette.
“You’re gonna do fine at school,” she said that day, blowing the smoke up and away from me as she stroked the back of her hand over my cheek. “A girl as smart as you can do anything.”
I believed her then, when we lived in a real apartment with houseplants, pictures on the wall, and a tiny balcony that overlooked a river. She worked at a coffeehouse near the park, and when the bell rang at the end of the day, she was always there, leaning against the empty bike rack. Now I don’t get complacent because we don’t ever stay.
“Where are we going?” I ask, as Mom pulls away from the curb.
She always has a plan. Even when we sneak away at three in the morning, she has our next future mapped out in her head.
“Oh, I was thinking Colorado might be nice,” she says, which surprises me. We usually head toward warmer climates when the weather gets colder. “What’s the capital of Colorado?”
When I was little, she’d help pass time on long bus rides by quizzing me on the state capitals. I graduated to countries as I got older, but she had trouble remembering all the countries, let alone their capitals. Her fallback has always been the states, even though they’ve been burned into my memory for years.
I groan. “I don’t feel like playing this game right now, Mom.”
“Humor me.”
“It’s Denver. The capital of Colorado is, was, and always will be Denver.”
She blows out a puff of smoke that gets sucked through the crack at the top of her window. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve been sure since I was six.”
Mom laughs. “You could learn to ski in Colorado.”
I roll my eyes.
“Well, you could,” she insists. She reaches over and strokes my cheek with the back of her hand. Her fingers are rough from washing glasses during her bartending shift. “A girl as smart as you can do anything she wants.”
I don’t say anything. Because if I did, I’d tell her she’s wrong. I can’t get a library card. I can’t window-shop at the mall with friends. I can only wait for the day she gets paranoid because the man at the gas station looked at her funny or she just knows the women she passed on the sidewalk were whispering about her. Then we leave. I don’t say anything. Because if I did, I’d tell her I don’t believe her anymore.