And for me, that’s it.
That’s just flat-out it.
“What will Daddy think? Really? What do you think Daddy thought when you abandoned us to go gallivanting all over God’s green earth with Hallelujah Dave? What do you think I thought when I showed up in Florida and discovered that there was no Great Good Bible Church? And that you were in the hospital? And that your fake preacher man with a bun in his hair was in jail?” I hear my voice, and I know it’s mine, but it’s as if it’s gone ahead without me, as if it’s motorized and spinning like one of those centrifuges in science class.
Mama stops the car completely, half in and half out of the parking spot, and she clicks the radio back to off. Her face goes all white—she looks worse than she looked when we arrived at the hospital this morning. And I don’t care. Or maybe I do care but I can’t stop anyway.
“You’ve been listening to us this whole entire drive so far, as if Paul and I have been away at summer camp or something. But this isn’t summer camp, Mama! This is real life, and I left my babysitting job and lied to Daddy and got on a Greyhound bus to Florida, all because of you!”
It is eerily quiet in the car every time I take a breath between words. I think Mama and Paul are every bit as surprised as I am by the words coming out of my mouth.
“Do you know we’ve been worried about you, Mama? Do you really know that? And that we missed you? Pastor Lou was right—you forsook us! You were supposed to be like Ruth, Mama, and stick with your family no matter what. That’s supposed to be in your moral fiber. What about that, Mama? What do you have to say about that?” I feel the centrifuge in my throat slowing down as a lump moves in and tears fill my eyes.
But Mama? She just sits there, staring at me. She doesn’t say a single thing.
“Mama, my God, I’m dead serious here! Wake up!” I shout through the lump and through the silence, and that’s when her hand flies up to slap me.
I catch it, just as it’s grazing my cheek. I feel a fingernail scratch my skin, and I watch her mouth fall open, like she’s just done something she didn’t know she was going to do.
“Oh, Ivy. Oh, angel. What in heaven’s name is happening to us?” She moves her hand toward me again, more slowly this time, as if to pat or stroke me, but I push away from her, my back pressing against the door.
“I owe you a lot of explaining,” she says. “I know I do. But I also know that I have never in my life heard you speak to me like that, or take the Lord’s name in vain. We are good stock, and we don’t do that, Ivy. It only makes things worse, and things are quite clearly bad enough already.”
The car hums under us, and my cheek stings. My mama may have never heard me talk like that before, but she’s never slapped me before either. Why is she the one who suddenly gets to be mad here? I feel my eyes, hot and heavy with the tears I do not want her to see. I can’t stand it, not even for another second. I twist around and pull at the door handle and start to jump out of the car. Mama grabs on to my sweatshirt and then on to my actual shoulder.
“No,” says Mama.
The car rolls backward a bit. Mama steps hard on the brake, and all of us jerk in our seats. I kick my feet out toward the pavement.
And suddenly Paul says, “Wait, Ivy. Stop. Stop!”
But I don’t.
“You care more about a God you don’t even know than you do about me!” I shout at Mama over my shoulder. And then I step out completely and slam the door with all my might.
Chapter Nineteen
I run hard across the parking lot, which turns into a bunch of other parking lots all strung together. I run past stores and salons and restaurants with their huge signs, and I run past shopping carts all lined up. I run past big concrete gardens of hard dirt and spiny-looking palm trees. I run past a little red car that has to stop for me because I don’t stop for it.
I run and I run and I run, and while I run, I yell. I yell at Mama and at Hallelujah Dave. I yell at Daddy and at God and at Pastor Lou and at Paul. I run, and I yell. I pound out every angry thought I’ve ever had as I run and run and yell and yell and my eyes and my lungs and my insides burn. I keep on running even after there’s nothing to yell about anymore. I keep on running until my breaths turn into gasps and the bottoms of my feet hurt and I reach the concrete wall that marks the end of all these parking lots.
And then I stop. I press my hands up to the concrete and I come to a lurching, gasping stop. I have no choice because from here there’s nowhere else to go. I’m done running and done burning, and everything inside me suddenly tumbles down toward my feet, just plain crumbles, like a church turning to ash.
I don’t have a money pouch. I don’t have a phone. I don’t have a map. And right now it really, truly feels like I don’t have a mama.
My whole sweaty, tired body leans up against the retaining wall, and I close my eyes for a long time. It feels like almost forever, really, just standing here. Not yelling, not crying, not even thinking. The setting sun shines bright against my eyelids, and I feel itchy and puffy and red. And tired. I’m really, really tired.
When I finally open up my eyes, there is nothing to do but turn around and start the hot walk back to the car. And as I do, there’s Paul, coming across the parking lot toward me. He moves slowly, like this is not an emergency at all, like everything is fine. And then do you know what he does? He lifts his hand and waves. Like we’ve just bumped into each other at the mall or something. Just a little wave, that for some reason makes me laugh. I wave back.
“I’m kind of stuck here, I guess. I mean, I can’t really go anywhere. I don’t have a phone or a ride or any money,” I say when we’re close enough to hear each other.
“Yeah, I know.” Paul stops and turns around when I reach him, so he can walk with me.
“Sorry about all this,” I say.
“I think it’s really your mom who’s sorry,” says Paul. He swings his arm out in front of me to stop me from walking straight into a pickup truck. Once it passes, I see our rental car, on the other side of the gas station, parked at a weird angle with the driver’s door hanging open.
“She’s not acting very sorry.”
“Yeah, I know,” Paul says again.
As we get closer, I can see that Mama is not in the rental car. The door’s hanging open, and I think the car is even running, but Mama’s not there.
“Um, where is she?” I ask.
“Looking for you.”
Paul and I wait in the car till Mama gets back. She’s panting, like she ran as hard as I did. She’s panting and red. She gets in and pulls shut the door.
“I’m so sorry, Ivy,” she says. “So sorry.” And then she pulls tight on the steering wheel, backs out of the parking space, and starts to drive.
She leans forward as if it’s hard to see, never mind that it’s not dark yet and the window is clean. Paul is completely silent in the backseat, and I lean up against the door, as far away from everyone as I can possibly be, considering the fact that we’re cooped up in a car together.
We drive for nearly an hour, but it feels twice that long without a word from anyone. Finally Mama says, “I know it’s up to me to break the ice here, but I don’t know where to start except by saying I’m sorry again.”
Which does seem like the right place to start, but I don’t say so.
“I made a lot of mistakes, Ivy, including slapping you. That’s what people do. We make mistakes. Terrible, awful, stupid mistakes. And I’ve mixed you up in mine. I could talk you through everything, every crazy thought I’ve ever had and every stupid thing I’ve ever done, but no story will really fix it all.”
I don’t say “yes” or “okay” or “I know.” I don’t even turn her way. I’ve said everything I need to say. It’s Mama’s turn now.
“I hope you can forgive me sometime, Ivy. In the meantime I have to work on forgiving myself. And then it’s up
to God. That’s the really awful thing about this whole mess—I was just trying to get closer to God, which makes it even a bigger shame that I messed up as badly as I did.”
I still don’t turn to look at her, but I listen. I think Paul’s listening too.
I mean, really, what choice do we have?
Chapter Twenty
I spent my whole livelong life trying to be a good girl,” says Mama. “But it didn’t seem to help, or matter. Because every single Sunday of my childhood, no matter how good I’d been, my daddy would preach a sermon with the angry breath of God behind him. I knew that he and God were keeping tabs on me, and I was terrified of them both.”
Terrified.
I feel a tiny crack open inside me, but not enough to turn her way.
“But then I grew up a little and I was blessed with your daddy, Ivy, the sweetest man who ever lived.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I say, ’cause I feel like I owe that to Daddy.
“And with you. You were a baby made in God’s image if ever a baby was,” Mama says. “I’ve had such a happy life with you both. It’s like you washed away all the fire and fear that came before you.”
She stares straight ahead and drives in her careful way as she talks. She stops talking when a huge loud truck goes flying by, making our little car wobble and rattle in the wind. Mama’s arms clench up tight till the shaking stops. And then she drives on, quietly. Really quietly. It makes me impatient.
“But if you were so happy with us, why did you leave?”
“I wish I could take that back, Ivy, I promise you.”
Which, you’ll notice, isn’t an answer.
“There was something about those wildfires that just got me spinning straight out of control,” she says. “When I learned that my daddy’s church burned down, I felt so sad and so sorry, even though he’d been gone for years.”
“You felt sorry for him? For Granddaddy? Even though he never felt sad or sorry for you?” I shift in my seat so I can actually see what she’s thinking, not just hear it.
“You didn’t know him, Ivy. He was a good man deep down. Really,” Mama says, almost like she’s scolding me. Never mind that all I’ve ever heard about Granddaddy is how loud and angry and scary he was. I play her words back over in my head to be sure she said what I think she said.
“Mama, pardon me, but that’s crazy talk. He scared you and he made certain you were scared of God, too. How is that good at all?”
I turn back to look at Paul, for sympathy or confirmation or something. He looks a little horrified to be included. He stares at me without so much as a blink, so I turn back to Mama, waiting till she answers.
“Okay, honey, wait. We’re getting off track,” says Mama.
Off track? What track were we on? The Granddadddy’s-suddenly-good-and-made-me-go-to-Florida track?
“For whatever reason, those fires made me miss my daddy—they just did—and missing him led me straight out to the Tomko Center, where Davey Floyd had set up his ministry. Davey was so familiar. His voice, his preaching . . . I got sucked straight in. I couldn’t help it.”
And as she says that, I remember something Paul said at the park one day, about his daddy telling him a career in space was “impractical.” And how Paul said that he kinda thought it was impractical too, but he couldn’t resist it anyway.
“Is that how it’s been with you and space, Paul? Like you couldn’t help yourself?” I ask. “Like no matter how impossible it seems, you just want to be a part of it anyway?”
Poor backseat Paul. I keep dragging him into the conversation, I guess because Mama’s answers aren’t very satisfying to me.
“Um . . . ,” he says, but Mama doesn’t give him a chance to finish.
“It’s just that everything makes such perfect sense if you listen to Pastor Lou,” says Mama. “Even God makes sense. Davey arrived and reminded me of the other parts of God—the fire and the anger, but the mystery and miracles, too. So, yeah, I guess that is a little bit like space, isn’t it?”
I guess. But even if we’re comparing God to space, I still don’t get why Mama would leave us for it, or for him. And she doesn’t say.
She just goes on about how Davey turned out to be a swindler and a stone-cold fake. (With a hair bun and glassy eyes, I think but don’t say.) And about how the police came to shut down The Great Good Bible Church—which wasn’t really any kind of church at all—and how she ended up in the hospital, so far from home.
“I was lying there feeling sorry for myself,” says Mama, “when I thought of God in scripture, saying, ‘Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.’ Just like that. And in some crazy roundabout way, that’s what I’m trying to do now. I’ve made everything so complicated, Ivy, when really, my only job is to love the people I’ve been given to love. My own daddy, for all his preaching, wasn’t very good at that. But I am.”
“Well,” I say. And then I don’t say another thing, because actually, this summer, she hasn’t been very good at loving us at all.
After Mama finishes her quote-unquote “explanation,” we drive on for hours without any of us uttering a single solitary word. It’s fine for a while—a relief, really—but now it’s pitch dark and the silence is starting to feel a little creepy. I wonder if I should turn on the radio. Or talk to Paul. Or maybe say a prayer.
Then I think about how Mama and Daddy didn’t give me a middle name in order to leave room for God. Maybe that’s what we’re doing now. Leaving room for God. Or for one another. Or for that one clear voice Mrs. Murray told me about. Maybe.
Mama keeps driving, and it just keeps getting darker and darker and quieter and quieter. The truth is, that “leave room for God” explanation has never made me feel any better about my missing name, and it’s not helping me feel better about this creepy quiet car, either.
Chapter Twenty-One
When you drive around this part of Florida, you can tell right away that the space program is a big deal. The newspaper they gave us at the hotel has a little orbit drawn around the O in “Today.” There are signs everywhere for the Kennedy Space Center, and a restaurant called Planet House, and a Laundromat called Sonic Clean. There’s even a street called Astronaut Boulevard. Honestly, it’s like space is as important to the coast of Florida as God is to Loomer, Texas.
“Hey!” says Paul as we pass another billboard with the space shuttle on it. He points as it disappears behind us. “No way. Did y’all know they call this ‘the Space Coast’? Man. How good does it get? I live in the wrong place, that’s for sure.”
I’m kind of awed that Paul would suddenly imagine himself up and moved to a place he hardly knows a thing about. I kind of want to defend Loomer, since it’s not that bad a place to live, never mind that we did run away. Temporarily.
But I don’t say anything about feeling awed or defensive, because I’m just relieved that somebody in this car is talking again. Driving across an entire state in almost total silence is harder than you’d think.
At the motel last night Mama and I each got a bed, and Paul slept on the floor. Which I thought was a mighty injustice, since Paul had been sleeping in cars and buses for three days, and Mama had been in a fancy motorized hospital bed with people bringing her soda pops and bendy straws.
But Paul is a gentleman, and he was not gonna take a bed from a lady. He actually said that. (Maybe Paul is a better example of distinguished than his dad, after all.)
This morning I flopped across the backseat of the rental car, still kind of sleepy, even though I had a bed of my own last night, and Paul sat up front with Mama. That’s where he is now, straight and tall, looking out the front window and then the side one, and then the front one again, sort of vibrating. I know he’s smiling his little half smile even though I can’t really see it from back here.
“You’re excited, aren’t you?” I ask, and as I do, I feel almost a kind of jealousy. I do
n’t know if I’ve ever loved or wanted anything as much as Paul loves and wants space. I mean, a dog, maybe. But dogs are an ordinary thing to want and not quite the same as space. I guess I wanted Mama to come home pretty badly, but that was more like a necessary repair than a dream.
“Excited? Are you kidding? Of course. I mean, my dad took me to the Johnson Space Center in Houston a million years ago, because I drove him crazy begging and pleading. But then he talked the whole way there and back about what a long drive it was. Which is why I totally can’t believe you did this long drive for me, Mrs. Green.”
If you ask me, Paul is being nicer to Mama than she deserves, but I don’t want to spoil his joy, so I let it be. Plus, he’s right, it has been a pretty long drive. This morning we don’t have an actual plan since we haven’t exactly been on speaking terms, but Mama’s following signs to the space center, which makes as much sense as anything else, it seems to me.
I pull myself up to look out the windows with Paul. It’s flat as flat can be out there, but very pretty. I mean, if a town is surrounded by the ocean, of course it’s pretty.
“So, Paul,” says Mama, probably just glad that someone is talking to her, “have you been interested in space forever and ever? I mean, since you were small?”
I realize I don’t even know the answer to that, which might mean I’m not a very good friend. Ever since Paul and I started getting to know each other, I’ve been so caught up with Mama gone missing and all, I haven’t asked him all the questions friends are supposed to ask.
“Yeah, always,” says Paul. “I asked for a telescope when I was five. I didn’t get it, though. My mom and dad gave me a pair of kid binoculars instead, with a picture of Woody Woodpecker on them. I don’t think they quite got what I wanted to do.”
“Parents often don’t,” says Mama.
Which is kind of an interesting thing for a parent to say.
The Great Good Summer Page 12