Excerpt
The night before she lost her momma, Tessa Lee camped out in a two-room tent with her momma, her little brother, Travis, and a crooked-nosed man named Goose. Goose had picked them up that morning at a grocery store in South Hibiscus and loaded their bags into the back of his pickup while her momma gave Tessa Lee a shove into the cab. When Travis was settled beside her, and when her momma had rooted in and slammed the door, Goose said, "Let's skedaddle," and they rattled through the parking lot, waving good-bye to the old men who sat out front on benches and waited for the ice-cream truck.
It was the first time Tessa Lee had ever heard that word skedaddle, and she sang it over and over to a tune she made up herself. She sang it to Travis and grabbed at his pudding belly and made him laugh until her momma told her to quit.
"She ain't bothering me," Goose said. But Tessa Lee shut up, anyway.
She couldn't stop singing it in her head, though. As they bumped their way out of town, Tessa Lee studied the rearview mirror and the dusty ghosts poofing up behind them. "Skedaddle, skedaddle," she mouthed to the ghosts.
They'd left behind her bicycle and her Weebles, her Spirograph and her books. Her momma had said she wouldn't need toys while she was on vacation, but as they drove along hot roads that faded into wavy black seas, it seemed strange to Tessa Lee that she'd be going on vacation with a man she'd never met before. He was friendly enough and let her steer for a long time in Alabama, but while Travis was steering, she turned around and saw that the wind had blown over a bag of her clothes. Her winter coat had spilled out, and the furry hood shivered like a kitten against the tailgate.
Tessa Lee shivered, too, in spite of the thick heat, and said to her momma, "Must be going on vacation in the North Pole if I'm gonna need my fur coat when I get there," and Tessa Lee's momma shook her head and lit another smoke.
"Smart girl," Goose said.
"If she's smart, she'll quit sassing," her momma replied. But Tessa Lee could tell she wasn't mad. Just worried. She could see worry in the way her momma tapped that cigarette at the edge of the windowsill, trying to keep the ashes neat and short and manageable. Not a bit like laid-back Goose who let his ashes grow long and fade to white, then drop down warm onto his hairy belly.
Goose listened to country and sang with all the yodelers and told stories about going on alligator hunts when he was a boy. After a while, Travis fell asleep, and when they stopped for gas somewhere in Tennessee, Tessa Lee's momma was left holding him while Tessa Lee went in the store to help Goose tote out the Yoo-hoos. When the man behind the counter said, "Your little girl's gonna be a heartbreaker," Goose said, "Already is," and winked at Tessa Lee, and she trotted out proud with the drinks and decided it wouldn't be so bad to have a daddy named after a bird.
"Gotta gear down," Goose said as they went up a hill, and by then they were in the mountains and gearing down a lot. Tessa Lee adjusted her legs so that he could work the gearshift. The backs of her thighs sweated against the vinyl seat, and when she tried to move them, a little bit of her skin got pinched in a place where the seat had cracked and the foam poked through. Goose jiggled gears against the insides of her knees, and Tessa Lee looked at her momma, who took tiny quiet gasps of air and twiddled her fingers through Travis's curls until his head looked like a hundred black fins.
They stopped again at a truck stop off a busy highway, a bright yellow building where they sold ponchos and fireworks and bumper stickers that Tessa Lee wasn't allowed to read. Her momma yanked her away from the stickers and paid for their bags of barbecue potato chips, along with some Handi Wipes for the truck. When they got back out, Goose had moved the truck to the rear of the building, behind three big metal Dumpsters that sat there like a row of rhinoceroses, minus their horns. He was changing the license plates.
"What do we need new license plates for?" Tessa Lee asked.
"Shhh," he said, then whispered, "We're in a new state, gotta have new plates." Then he looked at her momma and said, "Load 'em up, Sheila."
"Come on," her momma said, but Tessa Lee was already hunched down next to Goose.
"These plates aren't new," she said.
"Sure they are," Goose answered, looking over his shoulder and then giving all four screws another quick twist. "They're new to us. Hop on in the truck, now. We gotta scoot."
So Tessa Lee climbed inside and soon they were on the road, the red line of the speedometer climbing up to the middle, then pointing all the way to her momma's bony knees.
She thought about those license plates as she ate her chips, then while she sucked the barbecue powder off her fingers and nibbled the orange outlines from the edges of her nails. She thought about those plates all splattered up with bug bits, little flecks of bugs from faraway places. Finally she asked, "What did you do with the old license plates?"
Her momma sighed and said, "Honey, Goose just swapped plates with somebody headed for where we came from. Now their license plates will match where they're going, and ours'll match where we're going."
"We going to Massachusetts?" Tessa Lee asked.
"Absolutely," said Goose.
That night at the state park campground, they built a fire and had hot dogs without buns, and then marshmallows, and her momma said, "Isn't this fun?" and Travis laughed and ran around spitting on ant beds. He had marshmallow on his face, and the dirt stuck to it and gave him a little gritty beard. When Tessa Lee pointed it out, everybody laughed, even the couple at the next campsite with just a one-room tent.
Goose dug through a cooler and handed her momma a beer. Tessa Lee cut her eyes and said, "You promised," but her momma looked away and said, "We're on vacation." Then she popped the tab and made the beer hiss. Even after Tessa Lee and Travis were inside the tent, trying to sleep with a mess of mosquitoes and no-see-ums, Tessa Lee listened for the hissing of beers, one after the other.
And then it was late, but too hot to sleep. Travis was asleep, but not Tessa Lee. His diaper needed changing, but the diapers were out in the truck, and Tessa Lee's momma and Goose were whispering and laughing in a way that let her know that she shouldn't go out there. Then they moved to the tent, and Tessa Lee thought she should go get a diaper. But Goose and her momma were rustling the walls, so she decided to be still and keep her eyes closed. She'd never been in a tent before, much less a two-room tent, but she wished the walls were thicker and didn't flutter so much.
She kept her eyes closed tight and listened to the swish-ing walls and the smacky mouth noises, wet and sticky, and she told herself that Goose was just eating blueberries. It sounded like blueberries popping into his mouth, squishy as he sucked on them, and she wondered where they'd gotten blueberries and why nobody had offered her any.
The next day when she woke up, her momma was gone, and Goose was gone, and the truck was gone. She thought at first that Travis was gone, too, but then she saw him wandering around a couple of campsites over, and when she got there, he was licking a pine tree.
"Get your mouth off that tree," she said and slapped him easy like her momma would do.
"I like how trees taste," Travis said and kept on licking.
He was wearing gray shorts over his diaper--a clean one--but no shirt. Somebody had written a phone number on his back, in big black Magic Marker letters. Tessa Lee looked at the number and didn't know at first what it meant. She took his hand and led him back to the tent and found a box of Cheerios beside their bags of clothes.
"Is that your phone number?" asked the woman at the next campsite. "Whose number is that?"
"I don't know," Tessa Lee said. "Maybe it's the place where Momma and Goose went for breakfast. Probably wanted me to call when we woke up."
But she knew they weren't coming back. They'd skedaddled without her. The clothes in the bags belonged to her and to Travis. Her momma's clothes weren't there. Her momma's clothes had been packed in a duffel bag with the word Foxy written in rhinestones on the side, and the duffel bag was gone. The only thing she'd left behind was the two-room tent and her firefly cloak, which Tessa Lee and Travis had used for covers the night before. Tessa Lee put it on over her pajamas and didn't worry too much about dragging it through the dirt.
A security guard sat with them at a picnic table and waited, and then a police officer came, and a nice woman who drew hopscotch squares on the ground for nobody to jump in. Travis went inside the tent and cried until the policeman let him blow the siren on his car. Tessa Lee just paced around the campsite, looking for a note that might have blown away in the wind. There wasn't any wind to speak of, but she thought maybe it had been windy before she woke up, and she checked the back of a BB-bat wrapper she found in the grass, and she studied a receipt half-burned in the fire pit, but there were no words from her momma.
Finally her grandparents drove up in a white van, but since Tessa Lee didn't know yet who they were, she most certainly did not go hug their necks or try to pet the little dog who hung his head out the window and yowled. She wrapped the cloak tight around her and sucked on a strand of her hair, and when the woman who turned out to be her granny asked if she knew where her momma was headed, she didn't mention anything about Massachusetts.
Seven years later, when she finally found her momma, she wasn't in New England after all. She'd been living two hours away, all that time, up the beach just two hours and never coming to a single dance recital or ball game. Not sending the first birthday card or even calling when she got her tonsils taken out and had to spend the night in the hospital.
All those years, Tessa Lee made up stories for Travis. She told him their momma was a dancer with long legs who wore glitter on her eyelids and white costumes with transparent wings that glowed in the dark. She told Travis that their momma had fingers like feathers, and then he remembered how softly she'd held him, and he cried a little until Tessa Lee whispered that she'd be coming back some day soon.
Secretly, she thought that when her momma did come back, she'd punch her in the guts for leaving Travis. Tessa Lee was strong enough to take care of herself, but Travis was still really little. She could have waited until he was four.
Tessa Lee told Travis their momma smiled all the time and knew more songs than anybody, and she sang him the one about the itsy-bitsy spider and also the one about shoofly pie.
She told Travis that whenever their momma laughed, her laugh was as strong as cheese. Then they both tried to laugh that way, practicing to sound like their momma. They ate cheese slices on the back doorsteps, in case that would help them get the sound right, and Travis would say, "Like this?" and he'd eat some cheese and whinny like a mule, and Tessa Lee would say, "No, more like this," and then she'd call up a laugh from the lowest part of her throat.
But it never sounded quite right, and Tessa Lee knew it was partly her fault that Travis never got to hear their momma laugh. If she hadn't nagged her so much, she probably wouldn't have left.
Their granny, who was no fan of nonsense, would say, "Quit filling his head with dreams. Your momma's a drunk. I'm sorry to say it, 'cause I raised her better. But she's a drunk."
And Tessa Lee knew it was true, but she couldn't stand for Travis to think that. "She only drank wines from foreign lands," she insisted. "High-class wines. And one time, she met a prince in the cabernet section of the grocery store, and he offered to take us all back to his country."
"Why didn't you go with him, then?" her granny asked.
"'Cause in some countries, they treat women like slaves," Tessa Lee explained. "And here, women have opportunities."
When Tessa Lee found her momma, she was working in a wax museum on the boardwalk strip. It was the hottest part of summer, and she'd walked a long time down High-Seas Avenue, past beachwear shops and sunglasses huts, past dingy motels built of cinder blocks and motels that jutted up twenty stories and blocked out the waves breaking just over the dunes. She'd been walking for ages when she stopped for a sno-cone and asked the girl behind the counter how much farther it was to Fantasies of the Boardwalk, and it turned out she had a long way left to go.
She walked through air thick and sweet with cotton candy, then suntan lotion, chili, hot garbage. In the next block, there were diesel fumes, pizza spices, and incense wafting through a beaded doorway where a man with barely a mustache at all smiled at her and tried to wave her inside.
She walked over cracked sidewalks, around orange highway cones where workers replaced pipes beneath the concrete. Sometimes she walked faster than the cars could cruise, and she ignored the boys who shouted at her and invited her to ride. Her granny had warned her about boys like that.
She hoped her granny was all right and not too worried, not lying on the couch with her head hanging off the side, swallowing bits of crushed ice like she did when Travis died and her heart wouldn't quit banging. Tessa Lee's own heart slammed against her ribs, thinking about her granny, so she cleared her head and kept walking.
Finally, she could see the sign up ahead, a black sign with neon letters--fantasies of the boardwalk--and a row of white lights flashing all around the edges.
From the Hardcover edition.
