“Well, here’s the other one,” I said, wrestling back my tears. “Two matching shoes. Now we have to go home.”
Dad shook the leafy mess from his hair.
“Come on,” he said. “Get in.”
There was a no trespassing sign so close to us on my side of the RV, I had to slide up into my seat like a thief between laser beams. Dad found a big towel and draped it across my shoulders, lingering a moment to squeeze me close to him.
“Cass, are you hurt?”
The relieved part of me wanted to turn and hug him back. Even so, the mad part of me won out.
“I’m okay,” I said, slowly scanning the insides of the RV. With books and wagon and banner and tambourine all wet from the open moonroof and strewn everywhere, The Roast looked like it was going to a costume ball dressed as a shipwreck. I thought about how, on the day we left for this trip, Uncle Clay had wished us a clean start. And how this didn’t feel like a clean start at all, but more like a really dirty finish.
After pulling the moonroof lid shut with the Sneaker Reacher, Dad got back into his seat and squeezed the steering wheel so tight his knuckles turned white.
“Why, Cass?” he said. “Why would you do this?”
As I tugged and tugged on what was left of my eyebrows, I felt the words fight their way upstream from my gut to my lips. I knew I needed to confront Dad about what I’d seen. To see what he’d do if given the chance to confess the ugly truth to his daughter, face-to-face. The chance that Mom never got.
“Are you a con man?” I tried to say, but it came out kind of lockjawish.
“Excuse me?” he said.
The rain outside had stopped completely, but inside it suddenly felt like Dad and I were two empty Coke bottles taped together, with a little cyclone swirling between us.
“I said, are you a con man? And is that really why Mom left?”
It was a lot less lockjawish that time, and inspired a total deer-in-headlights look on Dad’s face.
“Dad, I saw you. Tonight, with the hotel soaps and the encyclopedias. I saw you carving.
“You lied to me.” My voice got even louder. “You said they were special, that they were part of our heritage, that we could change the world with those things. That’s what you said.”
Dad put his head in his hands for a few seconds. Then he turned toward me and laid his hand on the armrest of my seat.
“Cass, please just hear me out,” he said.
He was shaking a little.
“It’s just that…The reason I…I mean, you need to understand…”
Dad began three speeches, but couldn’t seem to find the rest of any of them.
“Just go from the beginning,” I said.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s the beginning.” He looked at me sheepishly, like he wasn’t sure I was prepared for his next words. “I made a wish on Abe Lincoln.”
He was right. I wasn’t prepared for those words.
“You mean that funny piece of soap we saw in the kitchen with Mom?”
“That very one,” he said. “The thing is, Cass, I’ve always known how much you admired your mom, how you looked up to her for the good she does—well, the good she did. And believe it or not, I do understand those feelings. I’ve worked a lot of years digging holes in the dirt and selling raw meat to make sure she could keep doing that stuff.
“What you and I both have to realize is that your mom’s leaving has been brewing for a while, and there wasn’t anyone or anything that could stop it. Not you. Not me. Not a trip in a cruddy RV. So the way I saw things, I had no choice but to try and rescue what was left of our family. That day in the kitchen, when your mom made a wish on that silly Abe Lincoln soap sliver, I made my own wish too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, and I knew it was a long shot,” he said. “But I wished that I could stop being a total nobody in the eyes of my own daughter.”
“But I never thought you were a nobody,” I said, instantly flashing back to a hundred reasons he might have thought that.
“Well, I’ve sure never been much of a somebody to you.” Dad wiped his face on his sleeve. “I guess I just wanted to come up with something special that you and I could share, something that was just about us.” He paused. “And that’s when I got the soap sliver idea.”
I gave Dad a hard, hard look. I wanted to make sure my next words sunk in good.
“You made me believe those soaps were magic.”
He drew in a deep breath. “I know. I made me believe those soaps were magic too.”
“But what about all the people we met?” I said. “The kids, the soldiers, the Belfusses, Ambrette?” A bunch of suckers, I thought. Just like me.
“All believers,” he said.
“All lied to,” I said.
“But all helped.”
That one truth plopped on top of the pile of lies made me feel more confused than ever.
“The thing is, Cass,” Dad continued, “I think sometimes, believing is all the magic you need. Don’t you see? They all believed so much, they made their own wishes come true. And didn’t we give them a fun way to do it?”
I scooted my arm out from under his hand.
“I just don’t understand how you could lie about something like Sway.” Even saying the words lie and Sway in the same sentence made my voice crumble.
When the storm ended, an unbearable first-morning ray of sunlight flashed through the windshield. Dad flipped down his shade visor, and I did the same.
“You’re right, Cass,” he said. “I did lie about Sway, but not like you think. The thing about Sway is, well, Sway is genuine, but as it turns out, not so rare.”
Dad took a slow look around the shambly insides of The Roast.
“Think about it this way,” he said. “It’s like we’re all born with our souls real sticky, and we pick a little something up from every person we’ve known.”
“Sticky souls?”
“Yeah, well, a lot like that lint roller we’ve got back there,” he said.
I must have looked as puzzled as I felt.
“I’ve been thinking hard about this, Cass, and here’s what I figure,” Dad began. “It’s like we all keep a little something from everyone, past or present, who touches our lives. Some of it’s as cruddy as beef jerky crumbs. But then there’s the sparkly glitter scattered in between all that. That glitter, it’s the part you want to keep—the pieces you take from others to help make a better you. That’s the real Sway.”
I felt a rush of relief to hear the words real and Sway back together again.
“And the soap,” he added. “Well, that’s just a mighty fun way to make it come to life for people.”
His words punched and kicked their way through replayed memories of our entire trip. “Oh,” is what I said. Whoa, is what I felt.
“Even for a muddy, meaty bore like me,” said Dad. Then he puffed his cheeks and let the air out in a slow-leak sigh, aiming his face upward, like you do when you’re either trying to stop a sneeze or send some sadness sliding back inside. Just above his head, the photo of baby him and toddler Uncle Clay had slipped and was dangling from his visor by one corner. Peeking out from under it was another picture, one I’d never seen before. It was a shoeless Mom and a beardless Dad hugging on each other, soaking wet, standing in the rain with umbrellas at their sides.
“When’s that picture from?” I said.
“The year your mom and I got married,” he said, tucking it under like he couldn’t bear to look. “Back then, all she knew of storms was that April showers bring May flowers.”
From the dashboard, Gordon Lightfoot sang about reaching the part where the heartaches come. Even just the wordless stuff was so sad I could hardly stand it.
“Don’t you have any other music?” I asked.
“No, but I guess I ought to find some,” Dad said, ejecting the CD. “You know, your mom gave me this thing the very same week that picture was taken, as a first anniversary present.�
�Long before everything went stormy.”
As he pushed the photo of him and Uncle Clay back on top of the other one, I thought about how he could have used his own can it! box on this trip too. But he sure couldn’t borrow mine. Mine was simply too full.
“May I ask you something?” Dad said.
“Sure.”
“When you ran away,” he said. “Why did you take the MBM suitcase with you?”
Oh no, I thought. Those poor slivers, they are gone and they are mush. Guilt pricked at my gut again.
“Oh, um, I dumped the soaps out,” I said in a small voice.
“And I left the suitcase too,” I said in a smaller one.
“Well then, that settles it,” Dad said as he cranked the engine. “I guess you’re right about going home. We’ll just pick us up a map and take the shortest way back to Alabama.
“Unless, of course, you want to go on,” he added, with a hint of hope in his voice. But despite how disappointing the thought of us breaking Rule of The Roast Number One and buying a map, I just shook my head no to playing assistant to his big hoax anymore.
After that, Dad inched and scratched us along the shoulder of the main road, trying again and again to knock a limb off the windshield with the wipers. As we picked up speed, all manner of prickles and pollens and pine needles blew off The Roast. He didn’t even bother to merge back onto the highway, but just stayed on the shoulder until the next exit, where we found the D-Lux Truck Wash just beyond the Ekim, Tennessee, city hall. The wash had a grand-opening sign that looked like it had been there for years.
When it was our turn at the washing station, I watched Dad vigorously squeegee the windshield, my brain doing the same back-and-forth dance. Mostly wondering how everything in my life could be so full of opposites at the same time. Hero, scam. Inspiration, frustration. Truth, lies. For a moment, it seemed that the collection of bad thoughts and good thoughts inside me was as unmixable as oil and water, like maybe I’d have to shake my head to make sense of anything.
Before I even realized Dad had stepped away, he reappeared inside the RV with a folded map of the Southeastern United States, two matching honey buns, two cartons of milk, and a box of Band-Aids. And not the little wimpy kind for paper cuts either. This was a box of wound-worthy Band-Aids.
“Look, Cass,” he said, arranging our breakfast on the center console before he took to ripping open three of the extra-large bandages. “I know I might have blown it big-time. And you have every right in the world to be mad at me. But please know that all this pretending—all the silly pretending I’ve ever done—has been done with your happiness in mind.”
I wiggled the little side mirror control on my door while Dad leaned over and carefully dabbed my legs clean with a napkin before placing the bandages on for me. He was beyond gentle enough for the job, and I was relieved that he arranged them perfectly, so that none of the sticky parts were attached to actual scrapes.
“It’s just, I knew that pulling your mom’s glory right out from under you wouldn’t be smooth, like yanking a tablecloth and leaving the dishes undisturbed,” Dad said, pressing lightly on the last corner of adhesive. “I knew that without some magic to fall back on, you’d have been hurt beyond what’s fair for a kid.”
“Like surplus suffering?” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “And then I thought about who you’d want to be like, if not your mom, and I realized it sure wouldn’t be your dull, faded dad.
“But I so wanted it to be me,” he said.
As he tucked the flap on the Band-Aid box shut, I couldn’t help but think about Scrabble games and pipe-cleaner scenes and a stupid cell phone and the endless list of ways that Dad had tried to make things good. So many things that M. B. McClean just seemed to be the exclamation point at the end.
“You wanted to be the cheese,” I said.
“The what?”
“The cheese, the gooey good stuff that fills in the empty space when a slice is taken away.”
“Oh.”
I picked at a little crusted honey bun sugar on my palm.
“But it was still wrong to lie to all those people,” I said. “And to me.”
“I know,” he said. “And for that I am truly sorry.”
Dad twisted around, lifted the fringy green-and-yellow suit jacket from the back of the driver’s seat, and held it up to himself.
“Guess we won’t be needing this stuff anymore,” he said, feeling for the tarnished chain that was tucked down in the tiny front pocket. Then he hunched over so I couldn’t see, gave the chain a good tug, and pried something off the end before tossing the jacket in a lump under the coffee table.
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
When I did, he laid a little golden silhouette-head of a girl in my palm. The head had Cass engraved in bad cursive across it. It was so lovely, I gasped out a little squeak.
“This is the one from Mom’s bracelet,” I said. “I thought she kept it.”
“Nope. I’ve been holding this one close to me,” said Dad.
“The whole time?”
“The whole time.”
I pinched the charm tight, smushing a perfect thumbprint across its cheek. Then, in the suddenly bearable morning sun, that smudgy silhouette took on a whole new shine. I couldn’t believe Dad had been carrying it with him in a secret place all along. Like it was the most important thing in the world to him.
Dad sat in the driver’s seat holding out the map at arm’s length like he was fighting off a monster. He’d traced our planned route home across Mississippi and Alabama with beige drippings from a coffee stirrer. For the first hour of the trip I was in charge of drying things off in the back of The Roast, one paper towel square at a time.
“So how’s it look back there?” he called.
With all the once-sparkly pieces and parts scattered about, the inside of the RV looked like the sad, littered end of a Fourth of July parade. Even the glitter cass across my curtain was clumped and unreadable.
“Everything’s soggy,” I said. “The afghan squishes. My backpack’s soaked. Your hat is kinda smushy. And the tambourine won’t even jangle.”
I didn’t mention my wall noodling, which, I was surprised to find, had not been affected in the least. That’s the good thing about something being permanent, I suppose. It holds up in a storm.
“Sorry about all your stuff,” he said. “But don’t worry about M. B. McClean’s things. Those fall into the don’t need no more, no how category anyway, I guess.”
And unfortunately, there was a lot of no more, no how on the agenda in the The Roast for the next day and a half. No more spying. No calls to make. Nothing to fish for. No soaps to choose from. No reason not to just feel the dampness of the bed under you and enjoy a collection of wet shoes doing their little musty stink dance around your head. In other words, The Roast had become a major snore salad.
“Just a hundred or so more miles,” Dad said, and after that, he, Gordon Lightfoot, and I were silent for the rest of the drive, which stretched out into a slow passing of yellow road dashes, mile-marker signs, and cows. I counted all the way up to a hundred and sixty-three cows by the time we finally saw a familiar exit, adding on twenty more that were probably hiding behind bigger cows.
Dad put on his blinker and veered onto the exit ramp.
“Why are we stopping in Nimble Creek?” I said.
“Gas light’s on,” said Dad. “I just thought we’d fill up somewhere familiar.”
It didn’t take but a minute for us to be approaching all the old familiar sights of Nimble Creek, Mississippi, this time from the other direction. The decaying minigolf course, the big twirly ice cream cone, the park where…
“What in the world?” said Dad, startling me. “Cass, do you see what I see over there? Is that a mirage on that fountain in the park, or is there something weird on top of it?”
I craned my neck to look, but couldn’t make out anything beyond the flagpole.
“I don’t see a
nything,” I said.
“All right,” said Dad, aiming The Roast farther into the park. “It might not be anything, but I want to go check it out.”
He found his way to exactly where we’d parked last time and stopped in the lot between the big gazebo and the old minigolf place. The entire park was empty, save for the occasional darting squirrel.
“Looks like the heat’s kept everyone inside today,” he said.
Sure enough, despite air-conditioning, we must have been in the hottest vehicle in the hottest part of the hottest day in Mississippi ever. Dad and I climbed down from The Roast, and I immediately noticed what a different scene it was from the last time we were here. No banner, no wagon, no tambourine. No moms fanning, and no kids playing. Despite the differences, though, I did notice something strangely familiar at the center of the park. And it was certainly not a mirage.
“No way,” said Dad, as he and I approached the fountain gazebo, slow and cautious like a couple of cats. When we got close enough to get a good look, I couldn’t even begin to believe my eyes. There, on top of the big fountain, rising up from its middle, was a statue of M. B. McClean, with his happy Cassistant standing right next to him.
Side by side, Dad and I circled the fountain and took in every bit of the monument. Someone had squished a mound of soaps together and carved every last detail—top hat and flip-flops and all. The little Cass even held a tiny tambourine in her hand. It must have taken all the leftover soap in town to do it. Underneath the figures, there was a poster written in green-and-yellow finger paint. It read:
In Honor of Mr. M. B. McClean, for all the fun
—From Michelangelo and the gang
I immediately flashed back to that boy with the Frisbee, the little Spider-Man fan who’d washed with the Michelangelo soap at the tail end of our crazy day in Nimble Creek. How inspired the boy must have been by M. B. McClean that he would be able to sculpt something so grand out of something so ordinary as old soap. “Wow,” Dad said. “I guess sometimes the zingle really does happen later, huh?”
Sway Page 21
