I was eleven when my childhood ended. That's when I learned Mama's love for me had a limit, and the limit was a state line. I also learned hope is an act of courage at the far edge of my reach. A girl could get hurt reaching that far, and Mama was too far away—always too far away—to break my fall. So that left Dad.
Just before midnight on New Year's Eve, he and I sat in our usual spots on the saggy gray sofa to watch Dick Clark count our way out of 1979. Neither of us said the words "good riddance"—the feeling was too obvious to need saying. The house was dark except for the glow coming from the little TV perched on the coffee table, a glow we leaned toward as if the California replay of the annual ritual was just for us. We counted out loud for ten long seconds while the giant glittery ball fell toward earth. When the ball hit bottom, the screen erupted with light and music and cheers.
Dad reached across the hollow in the sofa cushion where Mama should've sat and squeezed my shoulder. "This will be our year, Emmy." He lifted his other hand in a thumb's up. "The sky's the limit."
I wanted so badly to believe him.
The next morning, I lay on the sofa watching Bogart and Bacall resist tyranny and their own hearts. Old movies always comforted me. The characters rarely got what they wanted or needed, yet the endings felt inevitable, destiny unfolding its wings in black and white. Plus, I needed a distraction. Dad and I both did.
Dad stepped between me and the TV, held out my jacket and said simply, "Let's go, Slim."
I didn't ask where we were going or why. I didn't care. I passed him on the porch in a trot and climbed into the cab of his Ford work truck before he finished closing the front door. The truck smelled of turpentine and house paint, a psychedelic mix that still makes my skin tingle with adventure all these years later.
We drove in silence along our California desert town's only highway, surrounded by long stretches of scrub brush and loneliness in every direction. Dad and I didn't talk much even before Mama chased her rhinestone dreams to Nashville a couple of months before. Without her bubbly chatter to bridge our quiet divide, we spoke even less. Mama danced through life, arms outstretched to embrace the messy, the beautiful, and the wild. Dad and I were different in the same way, our footsteps soft as falling snow.
He pulled the truck off the highway somewhere near Indio. We bounced down a potholed road to a salvage yard. A battered travel trailer sat in the middle of a dirt lot surrounded by the hulls of old cars scattered around it like discarded toys. We parked and gazed up at a mountain of old tires through the truck's windshield, the glare from the weak winter sun making my eyes water. Crows swarmed above us punching holes in the sky. After a long moment, Dad popped open his door, gave me a nod, and together we stepped into the chilly air.
A man gnawing on the biggest cigar I'd ever seen met us outside the trailer. Dad stepped between me and the cigar man, a human shield against what I didn't know.
"Walt Mercer," Dad said. "I called earlier."
The cigar man pointed over his shoulder. "She's third from the fence," he said, or rather mumbled, the cigar swallowing most of the words before they reached my ears.
I squinted into the distance, counted three over from the chain link, and caught my first glimpse of the faded red car that would save us.
I followed Dad through a maze of rusted fenders. His shoulder length hair was pulled into a low ponytail that trembled like a leaf on a dying tree. I used to ride on his shoulders, up so high I could see where stars bent to touch the earth. Now those shoulders looked thin and shrunken. He'd lost more than weight since Mama left.
We reached the red car and Dad ran his hand down the length of the chassis. "'59 Corvette hardtop convertible," he said, to me I guess, since the cigar man had disappeared into the trailer. "A four-barrel dual carb, eight-cylinder fuel-injection asphalt eating machine. She's a classic."
I wasn't sure what classic meant in that context, but the carcass in front of us didn't look anything like the cars in the magazines Dad disappeared into most nights, those sleek as painted fingernails. This was a ghost, more oxidation than paint, exposed wires and disconnected hoses sagging through the gaping hole where an engine should be but wasn't. It had tires, if that's what you could call the bald rubber lumps clinging to its axles. I supposed it qualified as a car, and the crossed racing flags on the side wing detail told me it was a Corvette. But a classic?
Dad rested his hand on the curved wheel well, tapped it twice with his knuckles before turning to look at me. "What do you think?"
I looped a strand of hair into my mouth and chewed. No one, not him or Mama or anyone else, ever asked for my opinion. He looked so hopeful, and the curve of that wheel well was awfully graceful. I realized that he didn't look at the car and see what it was, he saw what it could be. I decided right then to do the same.
I tucked the damp hair behind my ear. "She's beautiful."
His head bobbed up and down like I'd solved a riddle. "She sure is."
Dad handed the cigar man three hundred-dollar bills carefully unfolded from his pocket, lashed the front end of the car to the back of his work truck with a tow bar, and off we went. I faced backward in the truck cab for our slow speed parade down the highway, shouting out the names of odd bits that bounced off the car and into lanes. Radio antenna! Orange reflector thingy! I swayed along to every jiggle and shimmy, like the car was two-stepping down the highway and I was her eager partner. Dad didn't dance with us. But he tapped the steering wheel to match the Corvette's rhythm, and wasn't that something?
We pulled to the side of the highway only once, when a hubcap skittered into the center median. Dad eyed the hubcap where it landed atop old soda cans and cigarette butts, then the light holiday traffic over his shoulder. "Too valuable," he said, stepping out of the truck and into the rumbling wake of a passing bus. I leaned out the driver side window to say something, anything, to stop him. I was too late; he was already jogging across lanes. I hugged my knees to my chest and squeezed my eyes so tight the world went dark. I didn't dare open them again until I felt the weight of his body bounce back onto the truck's bench seat. He was holding the hubcap overhead like a trophy, a lopsided grin lighting his face for the first time in months.
I laughed, whether from happiness or relief, I don't know. A spark had lit in both of us that I couldn't name but was desperate to keep alive.
Back home, we cleared a space in our single-car garage and pulled Dad's toolchests around the Corvette like supplicants at an altar. Dad called himself a gear head with a rare hint of pride, wearing his scarred knuckles and smashed fingernails like merit badges. Ours was a working-class neighborhood. If you stood on the porch and looked left then right, you'd see two rows of tidy stucco boxes, each with a work truck in the driveway and a mailbox full of overdue bills at the curb. But even among the trades, Dad's skill with cars stood out, our garage the place neighbors came when their starter made a weird click-click-click sound or the oil puddle on their driveway grew too big to ignore.
I helped him set a stationary jack at each corner of the Corvette's axles and, once they were secure, he slid a tattered green blanket under the car. We stood side by side with our hands on our hips.
Dad cleared his throat. "Ready?"
I gazed up at him. "Daddy?" I asked, not sure how I fit into his new project.
"We're gonna bring her back to life, Emmy. You and me."
I was a nerdy girl, my backpack heavy with books about Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, and other women scientists; I'd never lifted a wrench or scraped grease out from under my fingernails, nor did I want to. But I'd do most anything to keep from wondering about Mama between her rare calls home, listening through the haze of sleep for her voice to sing me awake in the mornings, searching for clues in the handwritten grocery list she left stuck to the fridge with a strawberry-shaped magnet. The gallon of milk and loaf of sourdough on the list had been bought, consumed, and bought again many times over, but she still hadn't come home. The biggest blessing of this promised resurrection was that nothing in the garage reminded me of Mama.
"Yeah," I said. "Ready."
School was on winter break, and no one wanted their house painted during the holidays, so we spent the first week of the new decade climbing through mounds of rusted metal and twisted crankshafts at junkyards looking for parts. Back home from the junkyards each evening, we spread our treasures on Dad's workbench and marveled at our finds. Dad taught me the names of the parts and what they did, even the small ones you'd never think mattered. I learned that a screw bought for a nickel could be priceless when you held it in your palm and felt the weight of its purpose.
By Sunday afternoon, we had managed to put a checkmark next to most everything on Dad's list. A few things he needed to buy new, like an engine block and floor mats. Floor mats were cheap, a new engine block wasn't. But it was too important to trust to scavenging. He had ordered a less expensive version, called a short block, from a machine shop the day after we towed the car home. It arrived in the back of a box truck looking a little forlorn without cylinders and a bunch of other stuff I couldn't name but knew Dad would need to build himself. We tilted the garage door closed ready to start working on the car the next evening after school and work. But first, we had to get through our usual Sunday night vigil by the kitchen phone.
Mama didn't call every Sunday, but that didn't stop us from hoping. She was never much for writing letters, said she couldn't waste this beautiful life sitting at a desk scratching out notes. And she didn't give us an address where we could write to her. I was secretly relieved; if we knew where she lived and showed up at her door one day begging her to come home, I was afraid she might say no.
I sat at the kitchen counter reading the back of a cereal box, Dad at the table dog-earing pages in one of his manuals. Neither of us spoke. Then the phone rang life into the house and I lunged across the counter to pick it up.
"What's new, Pussycat?" Mama trilled.
"Meow, meow-meow!" I sang in reply. Every call started with this same greeting before we dissolved into giggles. Her voice was warm, homey. I pushed aside my fear and frustration and let myself sink into the melody that made everything she said sound like a song.
She asked me about Christmas and whether I liked the gift she sent. I said I loved it. The white lie was easier than thinking about the generic Nashville sweatshirt, two sizes too big, that hung in the back of my closet, too painful to see, too precious to throw away. Besides, I wanted to skip ahead to my favorite part of her calls when she told me about the people she met while busking on sidewalks and playing for tips in bars. I'd never been to Music City, and only knew the basic facts and figures reported in the Encyclopedia Britannica sitting on my bedside table. She brought the city alive on our calls, made it sound like a funny kind of circus full of misfits and dreamers. I didn't say anything about Dad or the car, and she didn't ask. Those precious minutes while she dropped dimes into a payphone thousands of miles away were just for us. But when the operator interrupted to say time was up, I heard the soft tinkle of one final dime and knew the stories and laughter had to end.
"I miss you to pieces," she said.
I clutched the phone with both hands. "When are you coming home, Mama?"
"I'll see you again soon, Pussycat. I promise."
It sounded like the truest thing I'd ever heard.
I handed the phone to Dad, then went to my room to avoid hearing whatever came next, trying to hold onto the light feeling by listening to the Grand Ole Opry on my clock radio. I made it a couple of songs before the heaviness crept back in and I turned the dial to a rock station to drown out the quiet.
Dad and I quickly fell into a routine. Every afternoon after school, I would pop two TV dinners in the oven, careful to peel the aluminum foil back from the dessert in the top middle divot, then set a timer before plowing through my homework. Dad's truck would roll up the driveway at four-fifteen on the dot. We kept the TV tuned to a local station that played classic movies starting at three o'clock. Dad and I would eat our Salisbury steaks bathed in the flicker of Joan Crawford or Jimmy Stewart emoting through their final act.
Then we'd head to the garage and the magic would begin. Dad would slide under the car, legs sticking out from under the chassis. I sat by his feet and handed him tools, a mishmash of different kinds he'd picked up at garage sales over the years. If it was a cold night, he set up a space heater to keep me warm. And we would talk. It felt awkward at first, both of us more comfortable listening than speaking. But something about not seeing each other's faces allowed us to open up and share in a way we couldn't manage at any other time.
I told him about school, friends, teachers. We were studying planets and outer space in science class, and I was in love with the Big Bang Theory, some unknowable spark at the beginning of time that set in motion every other action through a limitless universe. I went on about it for weeks. He listened with real interest, even asked questions. Some nights, if whatever he was working on was going well, he told me about his childhood. He was an only child like me, and learned about engines by helping his daddy repair tractors for the small farms that used to dot the area before big corporations buried them in the sand.
One night, I worked up my nerve to ask how he met Mama. She had told me only that they met at the gas station where Dad worked in high school; I'd never heard the full story, his story.
"I was under the hood checking the oil on a car," he said, his voice hushed in the way people get when talking about the divine. "And I heard a laugh behind me." More than a laugh, he said, it was joy. He was fifteen, didn't know a thing about love. But that laugh made sense to him in a way nothing ever had. When he straightened up and saw Mama, aglow in a halo of that joy, he just knew. "I promised God I would never ask for one more thing if only I could hear her laugh every day for the rest of my life."
He said the last words so softly I had to strain to catch them over the whirr of the space heater.
I spoke with the confidence of a child who still believes God keeps bargains and mothers keep promises. "She'll come home, Daddy. I know she will." But even as I said it, I had trouble picturing her in our house, in our lives, as more than a fading memory.
I must have spent time with friends that winter, especially Sarah, my very best friend. And I must have talked to neighbors who wandered over to see what Dad and I were up to in the garage for hours every day. But I don't remember it if I did. All I remember is me, Dad, and the car. I loved those chilly nights in the garage, our sacred moments communing in a temple of grease and carburetors.
When I picked up the phone the Sunday night before Valentine's Day, I could tell right off that something was different. No "Pussycat," no sing-song voice. Mama was breathless.
"A real gig, baby girl. A studio musician. Fifty dollars a week. They're gonna pay me. Can you believe it?"
She kept repeating that sentence, can you believe it, can you believe it, but she never waited for my answer. I couldn't believe it, or maybe didn't want to believe it. Jobs are for people who have roots, who plan to stay in a place long enough to rent a house, stock their refrigerators with milk and bread. Not someone who was living out some cockamamy dream, like I overheard Sarah's mom tell our homeroom teacher at the school Christmas pageant. I wanted to defend Mama then, but now I was mad. She was supposed to get this music career thing out of her system and come home. What would it mean that she had a paying job?
The operator came on the line and I motioned Dad over.
"Gotta run," Mama said. "Tell your daddy I'll talk to him next time. A job! Can you believe it?" And with that, the line went dead.
Dad reached for the phone. I shook my head and rested the receiver back in its cradle. "She has a job."
His shoulders curled forward as if to shield his heart. We both knew the phone wouldn't ring again for several Sundays.
I marched to my room and blared Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" on my radio. I expected Dad to tell me to turn it down. He didn't.
I only noticed time passed by the changes in the car. One evening in what must have been late-April, after we'd eaten our TV dinners and watched Kim Novak fall to her death from a mission bell tower, I sat beside Dad's feet at the back of the car while he connected the muffler. The basic mechanics of the engine were almost done, and that meant we were close to our first test drive. I don't know which one of us was more excited, but I'd say it was probably a draw.
Dad cleared his throat. "I have a new friend I'd like you to meet."
Dad never brought friends home, and the only people he ever talked about were guys who swung hammers and grouted tile at worksites. Something about the way he said "friend" made me wary, like maybe this wasn't a guy with a tool belt.
"Um, sure," I said.
His hand extended out from under the car. "Three-quarter crescent."
I laid the wrench across his palm and his hand disappeared back under the car. His voice floated out between cranks.
"Her name's Veronica."
Veronica. The name flickered through me like a living thing. What was he thinking? Mama would come home eventually, we just had to be patient. I'd seen enough old black and white movies to know that patience and women named Veronica didn't mix.
"She's coming on Saturday for dinner," he said. "I hope you like her."
I was one hundred percent certain I wouldn't.
We stayed there for a while not speaking, him cranking the wrench, me chewing the ends of my hair.
"Time for your bath?" he asked.
I nodded, though I knew he couldn't see. I stepped over his outstretched legs and went into the dark house alone.
You'd have thought the Queen of England was coming the way Dad cleaned the house. All day Saturday, he scrubbed and polished countertops, tables, floors, even the cheap silverware Mama bought with Green Stamps a few years before. We'd let the place go since she left, doing the bare minimum so we could escape to the garage as soon as possible. Even though I made half the mess, he didn't ask me to help, and I didn't offer. If we weren't going to work on the car, then I saw no reason to leave my room.
I was reading the encyclopedia entry about Music City for the hundredth time when I heard a soft knock on my closed bedroom door. "You okay, Emmy?"
I hugged the weighty book to my chest. "I have a headache. My stomach, too." It was true, my head and stomach did hurt. I was hurting in a lot of other ways, but didn't know how to say that out loud.
"I saw a bottle of aspirin under the bathroom sink. Maybe some Pepto? Isn't that what your mama gives you when you're sick?"
I would have liked both, but was too mad to admit it. I didn't try to hide the edge in my voice. "I'm fine."
"Okay, well, you tell me if you need anything." I heard his hand skim across the flat plane of my door. "You'll tell me, right?"
"Yes, Dad."
"Dad?"
I had always called him Daddy, but something had changed between us. Or maybe the change was in me. I've come to understand pain does that, scooping out a space in your heart other emotions rush in to fill.
"Dad," I said, ending the conversation.
Veronica tried her best to connect with me during dinner. I answered her questions with as few words as possible. School was "fine," "I don't know" was my favorite subject, and my teachers were "just, like, normal."
She was prettier than I wanted her to be. Nicer, too. She spoke softly, not at all like Mama, whose lilting voice and big personality filled every room she entered. Her dress was purple, my favorite color, and her hair looked like Farrah Fawcett's, thick and flipped just the way I always tried but failed at. Even her smile was perfect, not flashy or demanding, but soft like her voice. I would have liked her if she wasn't sitting in Mama's chair using Mama's silverware, which made me even madder. So I focused on her shoes: white Mary Jane flats. Mama laughed at women who wore white Mary Janes, saying they were female Peter Pans who couldn't be trusted.
She gave up asking me questions after a while, mostly talked to Dad. From their conversation, I figured out she was the bookkeeper for the general contractor he worked for, and they sometimes ate their sack lunches together while sitting on his open tailgate. She seemed to laugh an awful lot, even at the lame joke he always told about the cannibal doctor who charged an arm and a leg.
Dad had ordered Hawaiian pizza, my favorite, but the smell of the pineapple turned my stomach and I only picked at the crust. I kept my gaze on Veronica's stupid shoes through the glass table. I avoided looking at Dad; the disappointment that surely dimmed his eyes might have broken my resolve. I was in the mood to break something, but my resolve wasn't it.
I got up to clear my plate and heard him draw in a sharp breath.
"Emmy!" He pointed at my white shorts, shock making his voice louder than it needed to be.
I looked down and saw a bright red stain flowering around my crotch. My first period. Here, now. The plate slipped from my fingers and clattered against the linoleum floor.
Dad shot out of his chair. "But you can't have... that. You're still a kid."
Veronica touched his arm. "Walter, stop." Then to me: "Everything is okay, Emmy."
But nothing was okay. Nothing had been okay since Mama left.
"It's not fair!" I ran to the bathroom and slammed the door. Flung open the cabinet under the sink, pulled everything out. Plunger, mouthwash, hair rollers skittered across the bathroom floor, but no pads, no tampons. Mama hadn't left a single thing I needed.
A soft tap on the door made me snuffle up my tears.
"May I come in?" Veronica asked.
If I had any idea what to do, any at all, I would have told Veronica no she can't come in. But I didn't. I opened the door.
She set her purse on the counter and pulled out a pink fabric bag. "I have a maxi-pad for you to use now and sent your dad to the market to fetch some more. You'll need maxis for the first couple of days, and then smaller ones as your cycle runs through." She set the blue paper-wrapped pad on the counter before pulling out a little white pill bottle and holding it up for me to see. "Motrin. You want to take one at the first sign of bloating and then every eight hours after that. The cramps will run you ragged if you don't get ahead of them."
I held out my palm for her to tap a pill into and then swallowed it with a fistful of water from the tap.
"You can shower while I put your things in the laundry." She picked up a hot water bottle from where I'd tossed it on the floor. "Perfect. I'll get this ready. I also asked your dad to pick up a pint of rocky road. It helps for some reason. He feels terrible, by the way."
"I know that," I snapped.
"Sorry. Of course you do."
"No, it's just..." I couldn't untangle my anger from my fear, the embarrassment from the hurt. I opened my mouth again to speak but no words came out.
She smoothed my hair back from where it stuck to my damp cheeks. Her touch was warm and tender. I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my t-shirt and met her gaze for the first time.
"I know it doesn't feel like it now," she said. "But this is a good thing. You're part of a special tribe, the tribe of women. Welcome." She pulled me into a hug. I thought about pushing her away, telling her to stuff her tribe. Then I caught the soft scent of lavender on her skin. My legs wobbled beneath me. I was so very tired.
I leaned into Veronica's arms and buried my face in the soft cotton of her dress.
Saturday night was all very confusing, and it was easier to not think about it. Thankfully, Mama didn't call the next day, and Dad and I went back to our routine without a word.
The following Friday, Dad tinkered under the hood while I sat in the driver's seat polishing chrome around the dashboard dials. Every few minutes, Dad would straighten up and raise his thumb, and I'd turn the key in the ignition. The first hour or so, the ignition would just click and Dad would go back to tinkering. Then on one glorious turn, the engine sprung to life with a deep, guttural roar. We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
My arms shot above my head in triumph. "It works!"
Then the engine stuttered and backfired. Dad turned his thumb down and I killed the ignition. This went on for hours: thumb up, a brief burst of hope and joy, then thumb down, head under the hood.
When we were putting away the tools for the night, I asked if Veronica was coming over again the next day. Dad shook his head no.
"Oh," I said. "I kind of told Sarah I'd go to the roller rink with her tomorrow night. But if you want to work on the car..."
"No, you go. You shouldn't spend all your time with your old dad."
"I thought—Well, I thought you liked Veronica and would take her on a real date or something."
He rubbed a hand across his brow. "Things are complicated, what with your mom and everything. Besides, I'm not exactly a catch. I don't think Veronica would want to go out with me again."
Not a catch? He was the most handsome dad on the block, and the nicest too. I hadn't given up on Mama, and was sure life would get back to normal eventually. But he was only thirty. Even to eleven-year-old ears, thirty sounded way too young to spend a Saturday night moping around the house alone.
"Well..." I paused, then spoke quickly before I changed my mind. "If you don't ask her out, you don't really know."
He switched off the overhead light and I stepped back while he tilted the garage door closed. "I guess I could call her," he said. "What do you think?"
"I mean, if you want to."
His ponytail bobbed up and down on our walk to the front door. "Yeah," he said. "Maybe I do."
Progress on the car slowed over the next few weeks. I spent more time with my friends. It felt good to laugh and talk about stupid stuff with people my own age, away from the house that still reminded me of Mama, the ghost of her songs echoing through the rooms. I felt like I hadn't relaxed in a really long time, so long that my face literally ached from smiling after spending a day with Sarah.
Dad was happy, too. He and Veronica went to movies and made dinner together in our kitchen on weekends. Veronica never spent the night, or at least not the whole night. I would hear their soft voices in the living room while I drifted to sleep in my bedroom, but she was always gone when I woke up the next morning. I decided Mama wouldn't mind if I was nice to Veronica, and she didn't need to know I looked forward to seeing Veronica each week.
Over dinner of spaghetti and meatballs one warm night in early June, I told Veronica about the space projectiles we were studying in science class, comets, asteroids, meteors, and all that. A meteor shower was expected the next week, and I couldn't stop thinking or talking about it.
"They're these white-hot lumps streaking through space. They never stop, just keep going and going in the same orbit forever."
"Lumps of what?" she asked.
"That's the coolest part. They're this mix of energy and bits of, like, stars and planets and things we don't even know about yet. My teacher says if you could catch one, you might find stardust from a distant universe a million years old smashed together with a moon rock from last week. She says past, present, and future are all in there, and in everything we see and touch and breathe. It's, like..." I burst my fingers around my head to mime an explosion.
Dad smiled. "My future scientist." He said that word "future" like it might actually be real.
That night, I took Mama's grocery list off the fridge and tucked it between the encyclopedia's pages.
The Sunday before school let out for the summer, Dad and I put our heads down and got to work on the car. We were so close to our first test drive, even friends and Veronica couldn't tear us away. We worked from early that morning, Dad under the hood, me polishing the chrome bumpers and scrubbing years of grime out of the seats. The time had already switched to daylight savings and the days stretched into night, so I didn't realize how late it was until I heard the faint ring of the kitchen phone.
Dad's head popped up from the engine, and my hand paused mid-scrub on the passenger seat. We listened, each making silent calculations. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to Mama. I just wanted to do what I was doing more. Eventually, the ringing stopped. I felt a kind of relief, though I couldn't say why. Dad and I bent our heads back to our work.
A few days later, Dad's truck pulled up the driveway an hour early. I was on the porch rereading a chapter in my science textbook. The school was holding a carnival the next day to mark the end of the term, so I didn't have homework, but the meteor shower was supposed to start late that night. Dad said we could watch it together and I wanted to be ready with facts and figures to show him I was serious about going to college someday.
Dad and Veronica stepped out of the truck and Dad flashed me a big goofy grin. "This is the day, Emmy. The car is ready for a test drive."
I ran down the steps whooping and hollering like a crazy woman. The three of us lifted the hardtop off the car so we could ride in style. I went to slip behind the passenger seat to sit in the cramped space behind it.
"No, Em," Veronica said, her fingers twining through mine. "You've earned the place of honor."
We shared the passenger seat, me closest to Dad between them.
The engine started up on the first try. Dad inched down the driveway in reverse, then eased the stick into first for a slow but thrilling ride through town. The three of us giggled the whole way to the market, through the parking lot without stopping, then back along the same route. Dad and I would point things out to Veronica, and she oohed and aahed appreciatively. We didn't point out the pings and stutters coming from under the hood; we exchanged knowing looks and made mental notes about what needed adjusting.
It was one of those perfect June afternoons, the sun warming the top of my head and making me a little drowsy, the car's rumble a reassuring purr. I swear everyone turned to look at us in that beautiful car. Well, not beautiful to the eye; it still sported the same faded, blotchy red paint as it did when we towed it home on New Year's Day. But I knew that the lines of the chassis, the engine rebuilt by Dad, the chrome shined by me, made that car the most lovely thing on the road.
As we sat at the last red light before home, I dared to imagine a new life for us, all of us. Dad must have been thinking the same thing. He gave me a thumbs up. I lifted my own thumb in response. Ten minutes after our maiden voyage began, we pulled back into the garage thrilled and exhausted.
After dinner, Dad asked me to walk outside with him to check the mail. As we made our way down the porch steps, he told me in a whisper that Veronica would be spending the night. He said it like he was apologizing.
"Her apartment is way over in La Quinta, and we both need to be at work early. It just makes more sense for her to stay, you know?"
"Yeah, Dad. I know."
"But you and me, we'll still watch the meteor shower tonight. Like I promised."
I knew that, too.
I thought we had finally put the sorrow of Mama leaving behind us. I reached into the mailbox and discovered I was wrong.
Funny the things you remember about the moment life shakes you off your feet. I remember blue paint splatters on Dad's t-shirt. Rays of light slowly fading to streaks of purple in the sky. The sharp edges of two envelopes pricking my fingers. I pulled the envelopes out of the mailbox and saw the unmistakable loops of Mama's messy script spelling out a return address in the lefthand corner of each one.
My voice came out thin and soft. "Daddy?"
He slipped the fat envelope from between my fingers. I peeled open the slimmer one addressed to me.
My dearest baby girl,
I wanted to tell you this over the phone last Sunday. Please understand that I love you more than anything in the world, but I need to follow my dream...
I tasted my hair before I realized it was in my mouth.
I didn't need to read further to know I wasn't part of Mama's dream. Maybe I never was. And I didn't need to read the official-looking forms clutched in Dad's trembling hands to know they were divorce papers.
Dad's gaze met mine. The look we shared taught me more about heartbreak than I could learn in a lifetime watching old movies.
My bedside clock showed 2:00 a.m. when Dad's feet shuffled down the hall to my room. I didn't hear his alarm go off. I figure neither of us slept that night. I'd pulled the Nashville sweatshirt out of my closet and spread it across my pillow before going to bed. I wanted—no, I needed—to be close to the last thing in the house Mama touched. The fabric didn't smell anything like her, only like the cardboard box it arrived in.
I followed Dad outside. He set two lawn chairs in front of the garage with our beautiful creation at our backs. There was no moon, the sky a chalkboard daring us to write the future. Out of the East came streaks of light. As the meteors shot across the sky, all the facts and figures I'd spent weeks memorizing fell away. Neither of us spoke, my mind full of questions I didn't know how to ask. I shivered at how small I felt in the vast universe of things I would never understand.
Dad pulled me into a tight hug, my cheek coming to rest against his chest. I listened to his heart's steady thump while we watched those impossible mashups of distant and near, past and future, shoot silently across the sky in their endless orbit.
