Sway

by Amber McRee Turner

  “How about anything being rebuilt or repaired?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you see any church missing a steeple because it had to be cut off when a rescue team couldn’t get a lady to let go of it?”

  I looked out my side window and saw that the only steeple in town was firmly intact.

  “Maybe she just remembered that part wrong,” I said.

  Dad closed his eyes for a few seconds and lightly bumped his forehead against the steering wheel. “Cass, I’m sorry, but I can’t stand to drag this out any longer.” He opened the lid on the center console between us. There on top of a pile of paper towels rested a shiny gold crammed-full charm bracelet. Mom’s charm bracelet.

  Dad motioned for me to pick it up.

  “I heard you make that call last night,” he said. “And I decided it’s time for you to hear the truth about some things.”

  I began to take inventory of the charms. Palm tree, beach ball, seashell.

  “There’s been no flood in Gwynette,” Dad said. “And there’s been no Toodi in Gwynette either.”

  Dad turned toward me and breathed in like he was trying to suck the courage from all the corners of the earth. “Cass, your mom hasn’t been a Response Team volunteer for over a year now.”

  I squeezed the bracelet so hard it hurt.

  “She wasn’t even in Missouri these last few months,” he said. “She was in Florida. The family she said she was helping was really some rich guy who lost his wife.”

  It felt like Dad had turned over a beautiful rock just to show me all the wriggly grub-worms underneath.

  “In the storm?” I said.

  “No, in an accident. Years ago.”

  Uncle Clay says, on the day he was paralyzed, it felt like he was floating above himself watching all the terrible news being given below, and he was trying desperately to wake himself from the nightmare. For the first time ever, I knew just what he meant.

  “Mom’s been a total fake?” My words came out all shrunken.

  “Not always, but for a while now,” he said. “I’ll be the last one to make excuses for what she’s done, Cass, but when that hurricane hit Florida last year, something bad happened to your mom. During a rescue attempt, there was an old man she simply wasn’t able to save. He died right there in her arms.”

  “She never told me that story,” I said.

  Dad draped his arm across the back of my seat.

  “I think because she was afraid it would ruin the way you see her,” he said. “She had a hard enough time telling me about it. It was like she fell right off this high pedestal we had her on and couldn’t get back up.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s when her life went into a tailspin,” Dad went on. “She quit rescuing altogether and went back to Florida to try to face her pain. That’s when she met Ken. I guess she must have found it easier to start fresh with a stranger.”

  “And his kids?”

  Dad let his hand fall to my shoulder.

  “Just a son who’s grown and gone,” he said.

  “But she came back home,” I said.

  “Only to get her things and say some sort of goodbye. To ease her conscience, I guess.”

  I instantly felt like I could be sick all over the whole dry town at the bottom of that hill.

  “How did you even know something was wrong?” I asked.

  “Two-three-nine,” said Dad. “She called me just a few weeks before she came home, and the caller ID showed two-three-nine. It’s a Florida area code.

  “I confronted her about it that night she came home,” he continued. “She spilled her whole story, and then she went nuts when I got upset. She threw the bracelet at my feet just before she left.”

  I opened my palm and saw a jillion tiny dents from the charms. My hand smelled all metallic and foul, like somebody had shoved a nickel up my nose.

  “Dad,” I said. “This isn’t an in-between, is it?”

  “This isn’t an in-between,” he said. “Honestly, Cass, I’m at a loss for what to call this.”

  “I know exactly what to call it,” I said. “Wrength.”

  “Wrength?”

  “Wrongness.”

  In fact, the way I saw it, Mom had invented a whole new level of wrongness. A bad so bad that wrength might not even be capable of describing it. Like maybe I’d be needing a fresh word from Syd to describe what Mom had done.

  “Dad, why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?” I asked.

  “Because I knew how you dreamed of going with her someday and reaching out and helping people like she did,” he said. “And I couldn’t stand to crush that.”

  “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you want to do something so noble and exciting?

  “Now you see why I wanted to go ahead and tell you about the Sway,” he said. “To let you know there was still a good bit of sparkle to be shared by our family.”

  “Here you go,” I said, handing Dad the bracelet, which was suddenly as shineless as our day.

  “I didn’t want you to have to find out about your mom like this, Cass. I truly didn’t. But I just wanted you to understand me not wanting to chase after her. And especially wasting something as special as our Sway to do it.”

  Dad put the charm bracelet back into the center console and closed it tight. I felt like an idiot for being relieved that I hadn’t found the Cass charm on there, as if there was a molecule of hope that Mom had it tucked away in a secret place because it was the most important thing in the world to her.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “this will be the last bad news on our trip. If you’ll bear with me for a stretch of road, I’ve got somewhere special I want to take you next. I know we’ve both had enough Misery for one day.”

  On the way out of town, we passed a sign that said, do come back! Just beyond it in the grass on the side of the road, there sat a baby’s shoe, smooth and purple as an Easter egg. A little Mary Jane, not yet scuffed or faded, and certainly not flood-damaged. It was ripe for the hooking, but Dad and I both pretended not to see it. It seemed neither of us wanted to slow our escape from the disaster scene that had just unfolded before us in that town. As we merged onto the freeway, between trucks so fast they nearly blew us off the road, it took everything I had in me to keep my eyes from making the first flood ever to hit Gwynette, Missouri.

  It was Misery all the way to Kentucky.

  What my mom had done was terrible, but not just regular villain terrible. It was something that was wonderful turned terrible. Like a teddy bear that grew fangs. Mom didn’t have to leave us. She wanted to leave us. To live in a place that’s not Alabama and do something that’s not SMART with a man who’s not Douglas and a son who’s not an orphan. And she was there right then not missing me.

  Dad reached over and patted my leg. He must have been talking to me for a while.

  “Hey, Cass, you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, just bear with me until I can locate that special stop I mentioned,” he said. “It’s a place your mom and I always used to talk about taking you someday. When we bought our little Castanea dentata tree, the man at the nursery told us about it. I think it’s not far from here.”

  How could he bring up my massacred tree at a time like this? I wondered.

  “You ran over the Castanea dentata,” I said.

  Despite being totally aware of the fact that Dad hadn’t meant to smash my tree, I still felt like he needed to do some non-surplus suffering for his carelessness.

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” said Dad. “But this may very well make up for it.”

  The two words make up repeated again and again in my head.

  “Just a sec,” I said, darting to the back of the RV.

  “I’ll be here,” Dad called out behind me.

  I went straight to my room and snatched up the pink plastic beauty box, suddenly seeing it in a new light. No wonder Mom was so foo-foo this last trip home. Al
l tan and flippy-flowy and shimmery. She had made herself that way for a start-over life with her new family. It wasn’t just the idea that disgusted me so, but mainly how long it had taken me to realize it.

  Without a second thought, I marched right into the tiny bathroom, set the box on the floor, flipped it open, and expanded out the tiers. Then, one by one, I emptied every lotion, puffed out every powder, broke off every lipstick, and crumbled out every shadow right into the toilet. By the time I finally pressed the handle, it looked like I was flushing a melted clown. The bowl was so smeared with bronze goo and flecked with chunks of shimmery chartreuse and goldenrod, it took three flushes to get it all gone. As soon as I stood back up, I caught a good look at my huffy-puffy, beauty-wrecking self in the mirror. And that’s when I discovered something that you might call the exclamation point to my day. It was my first-ever zeeyut, and boy was it ever red, obnoxious, and shiny. Not only that, but there I stood, with all hope of fixing it getting slurped down the toilet.

  Soon, the flushing sound was replaced by the simple humming of the bathroom light and the clang of regret in my brain. The noises filled my head so completely that when I heard a buzzing coming up from the floor, I thought it was just more of the same. That is, until I noticed the green glow of the cell phone screen shining up from the bottom level of the beauty box. I stooped to take a closer look at the phone, which was the only thing that remained in the box at all. When the 239 area code on its little screen made me instantly queasy, I swallowed big and did what I had to do. I pushed the ignore button.

  By the time Dad and I made it to Overlook, Kentucky, I’d lint-rolled most of the makeup chunks off myself and managed to totally anger the zeeyut with a lot of poking. I’d also wriggled my tank top off of me out from under my T-shirt and stuffed it in the middle tier of the beauty box. Then I skulked up to the front and slid into the passenger seat, scaring myself a little as I caught a glimpse of my red forehead in the side mirror. I saw Dad looking at me from the corner of his eye.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “That’s what yellow visors are for.”

  So I found the visor and stuffed it down onto my head. And Dad was right. Uncomfortable as it was rubbing on my tender skin, it covered the bump just fine.

  “Mom called back,” I said.

  Dad’s eyes widened.

  “And?” he said.

  “And I don’t need any surplus suffering.”

  Dad looked instantly calm again, and after that, things went totally quiet for a while between us. He asked me a couple of times if I wanted some lunch, but I’d kind of forgotten what hunger even felt like, so I just kept shrugging him off.

  “Yeah, I’ve lost my appetite too,” he said. “I’ll just stop and see if the folks at this greasy spoon can point us the right way.”

  We stopped at a diner where music-note decals were peeling up off the windows and a cross-stitched sign at the entrance said, That which doesn’t fill us only makes us hunger. The place had minty toothpicks, red spinning stools, and a cashier who called me “Shoogie.” While Dad chatted with her about driving directions, I leaned on the jukebox and scanned the numbered lists of song choices, looking for the one that matched up with that Florida area code. Two-three-nine. Whatever the selection might be, good or bad, I would have to play it, and it would forever remind me of Toodi Bleu. I ran my finger across two columns of songs, and then, through the cloudy, yellowed glass, there it was.

  239

  Take The Long Way home

  SuperTramp

  I’d never even heard the song before, but the title alone sounded like the story of my life: a girl and her dad take the long way home to try and forget that the girl’s mom might never take any way home at all.

  Just seconds after my quarter plinked against the insides of the jukebox, the song’s slow, lonesome beginning made me feel all kinds of miserable.

  “Come on, Cass.” Dad was standing beside the register, writing directions on a sugar packet. When I walked up next to him, the pen poked right through the paper and spilled a little pile of granules on the counter.

  “Good news,” he said. “We don’t have far to go.”

  Our next stop was so close, it was no wonder our directions fit on that tiny packet. My toothpick hadn’t even lost its minty flavor by the time we reached the place, which was really nothing but a clump of forest, marked by a sign that looked like the words had been burned into it. The one-lane road closed in around The Roast tight like a green sleeve. We passed through a collection of trees that were the tallest I’d ever seen, until we got deeper into the forest and saw some even bigger. One that looked like the great-granddaddy of them all stood over to the right, with an orange rope around it. There was no one else around, so Dad and I stopped right in the middle of the road and got out. The tip of the tree seemed to disappear into the slow-drifting clouds.

  “Go ahead. Give it a read,” Dad said, pointing to a plaque on the ground between the tree’s roots. It said:

  The Castanea dentata is characterized by the large saw-teeth on the edges of its leaves, as indicated by the scientific name dentata, which is Latin for “toothed.” Commonly called the American chestnut, the tree is a prolific bearer of nuts, usually with three nuts contained in each spiny green burr. This, the largest surviving Castanea dentata tree in Kentucky, measures 32 inches wide and 86 feet tall.

  I had no idea a Castanea dentata could even sprout leaves, much less grow to be such a giant. I looked all the way up its trunk until my neck hurt. Like I could have flopped right on over into a backbend just to see it all.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Really something, huh?” said Dad. He picked one of the loose burrs off the ground and pried it open. “Check this out, Cass. See those three nuts in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s say, hypothetically, of course, that one of those nuts were to go away.”

  “To Florida?”

  “Wherever a misguided nut sees fit to go.”

  He thumped hard at one of the seeds and sent it bouncing across the forest floor. “I bet even with that one nut gone, we could plant this here burr and grow us a new Castanea dentata that would make this big tall tree look just like your toothpick. Who knows? Maybe it will be the Alabama state champion by the time you and I are both gray-headed. You think?”

  “It reaches out so wide,” I said.

  Dad put his hand on my shoulder real light and cautious, like he expected a static electricity shock.

  “And we’ll be far-reaching too,” he said. “Me and you together.”

  “We will?”

  “Sure we will,” he said. “Just us two nuts…and some Sway.”

  And some Sway. His words echoed in my head.

  “Let’s sit a spell, if you don’t mind,” said Dad, and we squatted at the base of the tree.

  “Think about it, Cass. You and I have something big in that brown suitcase. Something that can help us get past all this heartache and hurt. Maybe not quickly, and maybe not completely, but it’s something pretty good we’ve begun, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I mean, just because your mom stopped helping doesn’t mean we have to. I’m sure not ready to call it quits on our adventure, are you?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “It felt really good to help people…like we did with the Belfusses. It was like all that stuff we did for them was really helping me too.”

  “Yeah, I’d kind of like to feel some more of that myself,” Dad said, patting me on the knee. “And where there’s a will, there’s some Sway, no?”

  Just the mention of Sway rounded off the sharp-cornered hurt inside me.

  “Well, that settles it, then,” said Dad. “Let’s camp here in the forest for tonight, and first thing tomorrow we’ll get on the road and do us a little sole-searching. Unless, of course, you’re weary of the shoe thing.”

  The instant sting of Dad’s comment made me realize that in a matter of days I’d become kind of attached t
o the Sneaker Reacher routine.

  “No, it’s actually pretty fun,” I said, picking at the split in the bottom of my flip-flop. “I mean, a rule is a rule, right?”

  “I guess you’re right.” Dad smiled as he stood and picked the empty burrs from his behind. He held out his hand to help me up, and passed the little green seedy one into my palm. On the way back to The Roast, I held the burr just tight enough to keep it from dropping and from prickling me too much. When we got there, Dad grumbled about the fresh coat of sticky specks along the sides and front of the RV.

  “Sappy Castanea dentata,” he said.

  Sappy Dad, I thought as I wrapped the little seed burr in a tissue and nested it gently into my cup holder.

  That night, through my moonroof, I could see a rectangle’s worth of Castanea dentata branches silhouetted against the sky. Being that close to my magnificent namesake inspired me so, I lifted the bottom corners of the Eiffel poster and tacked them up with bits of tape torn from the lint roller. Sharpie in hand, I got to work, at first just outlining a simple, fat tree trunk under the big SWAY that was already there. The tree grew as I added twisted roots to the bottom and a scattering of crooked limbs to the top, drawing more feverishly as I considered the distinct possibility that Sway could very well make Cass a far-reaching girl.

  Come morning, the canopy of green around us hung dewy and low. With no room to turn The Roast around, Dad backed and beeped us all the way out of those woods. Through the sticky-speckled windshield, I watched the Castanea dentata until nothing was left but its rounded top rising high and lush above the forest. Like nothing in the world could ever bend it.

  The drive out of Kentucky took half of forever. Out my window, there was nothing to see other than an arrangement of grass pastures and curved fences that made the landscape look like a lush green puzzle. Determined to keep watch as long as possible for a shoe, I focused on the pavement ahead until I got so bleary-eyed, everything looked like a shoe to me, including the liquid shapes inside my own eyelids.

  “The weigh station back there said we’re in Patakatish, Tennessee,” said Dad, trying four different ways to pronounce Patakatish. Shortly after, we passed a rickety gray barn with the words fireworks, flea market, and fruit painted across what was left of the roofing. Across the road, there was an Econo Lodge, a post office, and a Ford dealership. We must have been in downtown Patakatish.