“Hey, you two, lunch on the house?”
Joe comes out and hands me a bag with two bagel sandwiches and chips inside. I can smell the smoked salmon, and my stomach growls, yells really. It’ll be the first thing I’ve eaten today. There were no freebies from Mom’s late shift last night.
“Thanks, hon.” Mom slides off the stool. “And thanks for letting my baby girl take the stage this morning.”
“Sure. It was an honor. Louise, you’ve got a great voice. Keep at it.”
Mom bobs her head in agreement like he’s just stated the obvious—the sky is blue; the world is round; Lou’s voice is great.
“Listen,” Joe adds. “I know school’s back in session, but I hope you find the time for your music. I really do.”
Quick as I can, I drop my head and let the curtain of my hair fall forward. Mom made me memorize the name of the middle school in town, but I can’t remember it. Why can’t I remember it? Thank goodness for Mom. “Oh, she’s a good manager of her time, Joe. A real responsible kid. Homework first, that’s what I say, and singing second. And she sticks to it. Straight As all the way.”
I sigh inside. She’s gone too far. It’s still too early in the year for grades, even I know that, but Joe either doesn’t pick up on it or doesn’t care, because he smiles when I squeak out a “Thank you for the lunch,” and Mom pulls us away, through the café and back out onto the sidewalk. The sun isn’t as warm as it was just a few weeks ago. October is almost here. How am I going to hide the fact that I’m not in school once the weather turns too cold to be outside? Not that I’m complaining. I love the mountain quiet where I can be alone without bells ringing and bus brakes screeching and kids bumping into me. I miss the homework, though. There’s only so much you can learn from the donations in the Little Free Library. While we walk back down the hill to the campsite, Mom hums. School’s the last thing on her mind.
I flip down the tailgate, and we sit in the bed of the truck with our feet up and tucked into each other. The Chevy used to be white. It’s more a dirty beige now with cracks of rust running through it. But it’s home. I unwrap both our sandwiches, and we eat slowly, savoring something that’s not fried or out of a can. I lick the cream cheese off my fingers and then tip the paper wrapping up to catch the last of the crumbs. Right now, this is just about perfect. It’s cozy in the truck, and there’s a couple trying to teach their little kid to fish. He keeps throwing his Elmo pole into the water when he casts his line. It’s hilarious.
Mom reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear. I smell her, the warm tanned scent of her underneath the cigarette smoke. She moves to grab a Camel from her stash, but I catch her hand and hold it. She shakes her head but laughs.
“Maybe now’s the time to quit. A fresh start for me and you. Yeah?” she says.
I nod into her shoulder, and we both shiver when a gust of wind blows in off the lake.
“It’s colder now than it was this morning.” She sighs. “It’s probably eighty degrees in LA. What do you bet?”
I don’t answer. Instead, I scooch down so my head is on her lap. She moves her fingers through my hair slowly, and it doesn’t make me want to twitch. She’s the only one who can touch me like this without making me jump or cringe. There’s no startle reflex when it comes to her. I close my eyes and remember when I was littler and she used to do it all the time.…
It was the year I turned ten, and we lived down in Biloxi. We were hitting the casino circuit then. Mom had a job at a souvenir shop selling maps and T-shirts and gator-teeth necklaces. The tourist season was steady enough, even after the Katrina rebuild, that we could afford to stay at the Starlight, a pay-by-the-week motel just off the highway on a little strip of beach. I went to real school there too, all of fourth grade. Mom got me a Dora the Explorer backpack on discount from her work, and I ate a hot breakfast and lunch every day because the county paid. Biscuits and eggs and spaghetti and pizza and big, warm chocolate chip cookies. It was the longest I remember not being hungry.
It was also when I realized something was wrong with me. “On the spectrum,” I heard my teacher, Mrs. Guidry, whisper to another teacher at recess when I freaked out when a kid tried to push me on the swings. I didn’t know what it meant. But when I asked Mom later, she got mad and didn’t answer. Then I handed her a note from Mrs. Guidry and the school counselor. They wanted me to be tested. But Mom barely looked at it before tearing it into teeny-tiny pieces. She yelled that she was going to go down to the school to give them a piece of her mind. But she never did. We hit the road the next day. That was the end of Biloxi.
It was only later, after we’d moved, that I realized they’d meant autism. I’ve never been tested for it. Mom refused when they brought it up at school conferences. But I guess it didn’t matter. My teachers had already decided. They treated me different, and so I felt more different than ever. They were the grown-ups, so they must be right.
Mom lived for the weekends in Biloxi, when we’d hit up the “karaoke for kids” nights at the Beau Rivage and Hard Rock and Treasure Bay—all the big casinos. I can still remember the air when you first walked in. It was blasting cold, like stepping into a giant refrigerator. I kept a fuzzy old sweatshirt in my backpack that Mom made me take off before I performed. She said it was cold because they pumped in extra oxygen so the gamblers would stay awake and keep spending money. I believe it.
The karaoke nights, though, those were bad. The strobe lights were so bright they left lightning streaks on the back of my eyelids when I blinked. And the kids were mostly older than me, already eleven or twelve, and they danced and sang, and it was all hip-hop or rap. I actually like rap, the kind that sounds like poetry and doesn’t need instruments in the background to make you feel it in your bones. But Mom would pick Dolly Parton or a show tune from Grease, and I’d just stand there with my eyes closed and pull at the skin on my elbows while I sang. The only good thing about it was that no one really paid attention to what was happening onstage. Mom thought those karaoke nights would be our big break. She thought there’d be talent scouts. It took a whole year before she realized no one was looking for “the next big thing” in a karaoke club in Mississippi.
But after every show, when we were back in our room at the Starlight, I would take a bath and curl up in my towel on the bed. Mom would comb my hair out with her fingers just like she’s doing now, and we’d watch something goofy on the television… old episodes of Andy Griffith or Charlie’s Angels.
“Did you know I’m named after a Charlie’s Angel, baby girl?” she said one night.
I sat up and twisted around in my towel so I could tell if she was joking or not, but she was looking at the screen.
“That one.” She pointed to a woman with big blond hair and bell-bottom jeans. “Farrah Fawcett.”
“Your name’s Jill.”
“Jill’s her name on the show.” Mom stopped playing with my hair and curled her skinny arms around her knees.
“Your grandma wanted a beauty queen for a daughter.”
Mom could have been a beauty queen if she’d wanted. She’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen—even more than the casino girls in their feathers and sequins. But she never talked about my grandparents. All I knew was they’d kicked her out when she got pregnant with me at seventeen. “Hard to kick someone out of a double-wide I never wanted to be in in the first place,” she’d say any time I brought them up. I learned not to ask. But I still tried to picture them, Ronald and Leslie Montgomery of middle-of-nowhere Arkansas. They’re just blurred faces, though, all distorted like in a funhouse mirror. I guess that’s pretty much what Mom sees too.