by Betsy Ashton
“Look at you. You must have grown another foot.” I had the red pompoms on because I liked the way people gawked. Some smiled; other looked sideways, embarrassed by the batty old lady with the funny headband.
Alex looked down. “Nope. Still only two of ’em.”
“Brat.” I ruffled his unspiked hair.
Emilie was next and all but knocked me off my feet. She, too, was taller and very tan. Her hair, no longer yellow and orange, was almost back to its original light brown, albeit streaked lighter by the intense Andean sun.
“You wore them.” She pointed to the blinking accessory before breaking into laughter.
Whip, the man who wasn’t a hugger until after his wife died, swallowed me with his arms and gave me a kiss on the cheek. We grabbed luggage and hurried to my car.
“Way cool.” Alex slid into the now-empty back seat of the Rover. “I didn’t know you had one of these.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” I backed the car out of its space.
“Are we taking this to Mississippi?” Emilie asked. “It seems kinda old.”
“She may be an old beast, but she’s reliable.” I paid the parking fee.
I drove Whip and the kids to their new home. Emilie and Alex raced through the town house and tried to figure out who had the bigger room. Emilie did, but Alex’s looked bigger. I made coffee, and Whip and I sat down at the dining room table. The town house wasn’t as roomy as the old house, so we couldn’t have kitchen talks like we did when we were figuring out how to handle Merry’s infidelity. We had tons of details to get through before I left.
“Johnny and I are leaving at oh-my-god-it’s-dark-hundred on Sunday.” I checked off another item on my list. “I unloaded the Rover and stowed gear, food, and supplies in my RV.”
“Gotta get into the office for a few days to wrap up the paperwork on Peru.” Whip relaxed and looked around his new home. His smile told me I’d made the right decision. “I’ll try to leave by midweek, maybe a day or two later.”
“I can take the kids. I’m driving the girls’ dorm. There’s plenty of room.”
“The girls’ dorm?” Whip asked.
“Em and I are sharing one of the RVs. Hence, the girls’ dorm. Get it?”
Whip nodded. “Alex and I are in the boys’ dorm?”
“What else?”
“Can’t wait to see the trailers.”
“Gad! Even you think we’ll be trailer trash.” I looked up in time to catch Whip’s wink. “Can you go with me tomorrow morning to check everything out? I shipped a mountain of boxes to your office. Can you fetch them on your way to the dealership?”
“Can do.”
Emilie and Alex dashed back to the living room after checking out their bedrooms. Alex threw himself on the couch and grabbed the remote. He turned on the television and shouted, “Yippee, cable.”
“Use your indoor voice, Alex. You have neighbors on the other side of the walls.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Alex had picked up tons of bad habits in Peru. They had to go. Beginning now.
“Yes, ma’am.” Alex turned the volume down on the television too.
At the ungodly hour of eight in the morning, I piled travel-lagged kids into the Rover and drove to the RV dealer to show them their new homes away from home.
####
Alex galloped to the boys’ dorm. Inside, he stopped short and stared at his IKEA-inspired study-sleeping area. Like a shipboard cabin, Alex’s desk and bookshelves were underneath the bed. His space was all metallic pipes and shelves, very rugged and masculine. His eyes bulged when he spied unopened boxes under the desk.
“A new computer? And a new PlayStation? You’re the greatest, Mad Max.” He tugged the first box into the passageway.
“Don’t open them. Your toys will be safer in their shipping cartons.”
I left Alex itching to unpack his electronics; he didn’t give a darn about his clothes and personal items. Emilie and I walked over to the girls’ dorm. Emilie’s personal space was all blond wood and brightly-colored squishy pillows. She stowed her boxes and bags. When she climbed into her bed, she discovered a beat-up toy, a Puss in Boots, propped against pillows. At one time it had been her mother’s favorite.
“Wow. I never imagined you’d give this to me. Thank you.” She hopped down and threw her arms around my neck. I caught a glint of a tear. A gentle warmth flowed through me.
Johnny and Whip pulled up with two truckloads of boxes. I played foreman: those boxes in that RV, this stack in this one. The kids marched them to their respective dorms and stowed them in empty cabinets. We’d have plenty of time to unpack in Mississippi.
The final thing I wanted Whip to do was check the tow bar assembly. If Johnny wasn’t around when I needed to unhook the Rover, I had to know how the darned thing worked.
“I want to go with you, Mad Max. We haven’t had much time for girl talk. I have a lot to tell you.”
Alex wanted to ride with his father.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On the road to Mississippi, September 18 and 19
Early Sunday morning, Johnny climbed behind the wheel of his truck. I did the same in the girls’ dorm. We headed west out of Richmond and angled across southwestern Virginia toward I-81. I half turned my head toward Emilie.
“So, today we’re taking our first decisive steps into the unknown.”
“It’s going to be fine, Mad Max.” Emilie grinned, teeth flashing white against her tan. “Think of it as the first day of the rest of our lives.”
I groaned. Emilie knew how much I hated that cliché. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“Gotcha.” She semi-reclined in the captain’s seat next to me, worn out from the non-sleep sleepover at her best friend Molly’s and last-minute rushing around. Within half an hour, she zonked out, head rested against the side window.
What had she and Dr. Schwartz talked about at their last face-to-face therapy session? She’d tell me when she was ready. Or not. Teenage girls needed their secrets. I could respect that. I had mine too.
Three hours into our trip, state troopers shunted all traffic off I-81 onto a rural road. The southbound interstate was closed by a massive tractor-trailer accident. We crawled through rundown hamlets where small frame houses with giant satellite dishes butted against the pavement. Old-fashioned clotheslines sagged under the weight of oversized bib overalls drying in the sun. On several front porches, refrigerators stood next to beat-up couches. Beside a once-blue house, an old couple sat in ancient metal patio chairs. The woman swatted flies, while the man threw a ball for a dog. I waved. They stared.
Our detour lasted for several miles before state troopers allowed us back on the interstate. We pulled into a truck stop for lunch and stretched cramped legs. We studied the map and talked about how far we’d get the first day. Johnny wanted to be at the site in two days, so we’d press on until I was too tired to drive.
“This may sound silly, but can we stay overnight at a Walmart?” Emilie squirted ketchup on her pile of fries. Sometimes she had weird ideas, but this one made sense. Walmart was known for being camper-friendly.
“Okay by me. How about you, Max?”
“Why not? The parking lots are clean, well-lighted spaces. Isn’t Walmart camping part of life on the road?”
“Besides, we can shop.” Emilie grabbed a napkin to make a list of what she couldn’t live without.
“Do you know I’ve never set foot in a Walmart?” We didn’t have them in New York City. Walmart shopper jokes on the Internet tainted my impression. Like Johnny and Manhattan, I was allergic to the concept of Walmart.
“Boy, are you in for a treat.” Johnny led us back to our vehicles. “Or a shock.”
Emilie stayed awake after lunch as we wound our way into Tennessee. She told me all the gossip from the sleepover at her best friend’s house, what courses her friends were going to take and which boys the girls thought were hot.
“You’ll be ahead of your frien
ds if Mr. Ducks keeps to his curriculum.”
“What’s it going to be like?”
“What’s what going to be like? Homeschooling?”
“No. Mississippi. I mean, the hurricane did a lot of damage and killed a lot of people. I don’t know if I can handle what I’ll feel.”
Was this what she and Dr. Schwartz discussed? How to deal with cosmic pain? I felt the warmth again. “I don’t know how I’ll handle it either.”
“You? You’re worried?” Emilie stared at me.
“Of course. Johnny’s described what he saw, but I have no idea what it’ll be like.”
“Wow.”
“What? Did you think I was superwoman?” I took my eyes off the interstate long enough to tug a lock of hair tinted pink. The sleepover included a makeover.
Emilie was once more my way-too-old granddaughter. “Can we not feel the hurt and pain?”
“Can you not breathe?”
####
We stopped for the night in a Walmart on the south side of Nashville. Three other RVs of varying age and size were grouped at the outer edge of the large lot when we pulled in an aisle away. After dinner in the dorm, Johnny and I went outside to walk around.
Emilie disappeared into the store. “It might be my last chance to shop for a long time.”
No sooner had we stepped outside than a couple about my age wandered over, a bottle of wine in hand.
“When you pulled in, I figured we’d be neighborly. I’m Hank Scott, and this is my wife, Valerie.”
“Max Davies.”
“Johnny Medina.”
We shook hands. I went back into the RV to root out plastic glasses, since I hadn’t unpacked anything better. I unearthed some folding chairs. We arranged ourselves on the pavement in the still-warm evening.
“We’re Care-A-Vanners.” Hank, a tall lean man with thick gray hair, poured the wine.
I glanced at the label. Top shelf. Hank’s philosophy matched mine: Life was too short to drink bad wine. Or eat bad chocolate. Even if we were living in a trailer and drinking from plastic glasses in a Walmart parking lot.
“What’s that?” Was there an entire subculture roaming our highways I knew nothing about?
“We live in our RV year round. When I got tired of cleaning eight-thousand square feet of house, we did something radical. We downsized and acquired wheels.” Val nodded toward her RV, which was as big as mine. “We can go anywhere we want.”
How weird would it be to have no house by choice, not by chance? “Ours is temporary. It’s the best solution we have right now for housing.”
“We love the freedom of being able to unhook and go on a moment’s notice, but after a year, we got bored with too much leisure time.” Hank sniffed the wine before taking a sip. The plastic glass didn’t dampen his enjoyment.
“Being aimless left us without a sense of purpose. When the Mississippi River flooded in the mid-1990s, we headed out to help.” Val, an athletic brunette of about sixty, grinned. “I filled about a million sandbags to shore up a levy. The Care-A-Vanners began there. Other RVers worked with us. We exchanged e-mails and phone numbers.”
Before they knew it, they had over forty names of people who wanted to volunteer. Hank contacted Habitat for Humanity to see where it could use help. “Now, we’re an official part of their program.”
“We’ve built a community of road people like us, Max.” Val had a list of new best friends.
“We’d never have met them in our old life.” Hank stretched his arms over his head.
“You can say that again.” Val turned to wink at her husband.
What was their old life like?
“As you might guess, we’re on our way to Gulfport, where Habitat’s central coordinating office is. We don’t know where we’ll be working until we get our assignments.”
Johnny said we’d be out along highway ninety between some place destroyed and some other place wiped out.
“Join us.” Hank stood and stretched once more. He yawned. “We always need more hands.”
“I may do that,” I looked toward the big box store. No Emilie. “I’m not sure we qualify, though, as Care-A-Vanners, I mean.”
“Why not?” Val handed me a card with their phone numbers.
Johnny and I pulled out ours.
“We all have permanent homes. We don’t live in the RV all the time.”
“You’re healthy, aren’t you?” Hank asked.
“Yes.”
“You have two hands, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You qualify.” Hank called over his shoulder. “See you in Mississippi.”
“Thanks for the wine.”
“Next time you see us, we’ll be under hard hats.”
Val looked at my linen slacks. “Did you bring clothes you don’t mind ruining?”
What was I thinking? I couldn’t wear Manhattan casual from Bloomingdale’s in a disaster zone. I shook my head.
“Go inside and shop. When this is over, you can toss what you buy today.”
I tucked Val and Hank’s phone numbers in my pocket. They might be fun to look up if or when we had cell coverage. Johnny kissed me and headed toward his trailer. I walked into Walmart to find Emilie. I steeled myself for my first exposure to the butt of too many late night talk show jokes. It wasn’t what I expected. Clean, well-lighted, with wider aisles than any store in Manhattan, and massive.
I pushed a shopping cart down aisle after aisle. In the clothing section, I tossed cotton shorts, denim shorts, jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts and other disposable clothes into the cart. I added a couple of pairs of cheap sneakers. The more I ambled through the store, the more things I added to my basket. Books, board games, CDs, and DVDs. Soccer balls and nets, volleyballs and a net went into the cart.
When I hit the toy section, my cell buzzed.
“Where are you?” Emilie asked.
“Head to the toy section.”
“You’re inside?”
“I am. Shocked?”
By the time Emilie turned into the right aisle, I had a hula hoop spinning around my waist. My granddaughter almost wet herself laughing. “You’re wild.”
“What did you expect? Mad has multiple meanings.”
####
On our second day on the road, we drove straight south through Alabama toward Mobile. By midday, we met our first belts of abject poverty that had nothing to do with natural disasters. Emilie couldn’t take her eyes off the broken-down trailers and ramshackle houses along the highway.
“I had no idea how poor some parts of America are.”
I’d seen poverty abroad and homelessness in New York, but Emilie had never seen how poor, poor could be. Tough object lesson. “People distinguish between poor and po’. Seems like this qualifies as po’, don’tcha think?”
Emilie didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead. I wondered where her mind was.
Johnny left us after lunch to be sure everything was set for our arrival.
“Turn right at Mobile on I-10.”
An hour into the next leg of our journey, Emilie turned to look at me. “Do you ever think about Mom?”
The question blindsided me.
“Every damned day. What about you?” I wanted to hug her but I had all I could do to keep the RV on the road.
“Sometimes I can’t remember what she looked like before her accident.” A tear hung on her lower lashes. “I look for memories of her, but I can’t seem to find them.”
“I know what you mean. I want to forget what she was like after the accident and remember how she was before.”
“What did Auntie Eleanor mean when she gave you a ‘doo-wop’?” Emilie twisted toward me as much as her seat belt would allow.
Ah yes, my “doo-wop.”
“Auntie Eleanor meant Mom’s accident gave me a second chance, a do-over, to heal the estrangement between us.” I’d had great hopes of healing a long-time rift with my daughter.
“Did you?”
&nbs
p; “At first I told myself I could. This time we’d have a normal mother-daughter relationship.” I made no effort to hide my pain. Why bother? Emilie would feel it. “I told myself so many lies I almost believed them.
“Unfortunately, I ran out of time.” A lone tear leaked down my cheek.
“It would have worked.”
Emilie had a bead of sweat on her upper lip. She was in her secret place where she sought answers to questions for which I had no clue. When she returned to the present, she asked one more question that I didn’t anticipate.
“What did you do with the money? I mean the money you took from Mom’s safe deposit box right before she died.”
I knew precisely what she was talking about. “I put it in college accounts for you and Alex.”
Her smile challenged the sun for brilliance.
####
About a hundred miles east of our destination, the land changed. I noticed the lack of underbrush first. Smashed flat buildings left behind piles of timber and rubble. A few tattered live oak trees stood like wounded sentries. Gray-brown dirt piled head high with debris. I expected Spanish moss to hang in ghostly curtains from oak branches, but the moss had been shredded by the hurricane-force winds.
I followed the GPS off the interstate and groped my way along no-longer-marked state and county roads, many of them barely passable. Were they this bad before Katrina? We came upon a sign for a small town. Just the sign. No town. I was doing about twenty miles an hour, because dirt and debris covered the road—where there was a road. Large chunks of pavement had washed away.
“Will you pull over for a minute?” Emilie was pale.
“Are you ill?”
“No. I want to get out and look at something.”
I stopped where the edge of the road should have been. Not that it mattered. With no other cars in the vicinity, I could have parked crosswise and bothered no one.
Emilie waved a hand. “What do you see?”
On one side of the street were battered trees, dirt swept free of grass and shrubs, piles of rubble, plastic grocery bags, a broken pink bicycle in a tree, sheet metal, ubiquitous white plastic chairs on their sides—the detritus of American civilization. On the other side, nothing. What was she seeing that I was missing?
