Big Fat Disaster (12 page)

Mom crosses to the coffee table, picks up the TV remote, and clicks it On. She doesn’t look at us but mumbles, “I didn’t say that.”

Drew insists, “Yes, you did! Remember? Remember, Mama? You, Aunt Judy, and Grandma were trying to figure out why she got all those tattoos, and Uncle Dale, Grandpa, and Daddy kept talking about how she already ruined Ryan.”

Mom stares, trancelike, flipping the channels, but going so fast that there’s no way she could be seeing each TV show.

“…Mama?” Drew just doesn’t know when to give up. “…Mama? Didn’t you say that?”

I whisper, “Drew! Knock it off!” I catch her eye and shake my head.

Drew throws her hands up and mouths, “
What?
”

I mouth, “Shut up!”

Mom blasts, “
Yes
!” She whips around, and her eyes look wild. Just as suddenly, it’s like she hits a switch in her mind and stares at the remote in her hand. She sputters, “Yes…I said some…things…that day. And…just because I accepted Leah’s offer doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my mind about…everything. We’re still the same people we were.”

Her words echo off the walls of our packed-up home, and I wonder if they sound as empty to her as they do to me. I heave myself out of the chair and place myself between Mom and Drew. “So, when are we moving?”

Friday morning, just before the crew Mom hired shows up with a moving truck, I drag a stepladder to my room, peel a glow-in-the-dark star from my ceiling, and slide it into my pocket.

Within a couple of hours, the house is just a shell. Mom and Drew give it one last walk-through while I start the car and roll down the windows to release the August heat. Mom’s locking the front door when the News Ten van pulls up at the end of our driveway, blocking us in.

Susie Harlan hurries up our driveway. Her cameraman follows a few feet behind. She glances at me in the car and continues toward Mom, then abruptly stops and comes back to me. My stomach clenches.

She smiles. “So, you’re moving, huh?”

I nod.

“That’s exciting. Where are you going?” Her notepad seems to appear out of thin air. I narrow my eyes at her. Drew opens the rear passenger door and gets in without a word.

“That’s none of your business,” Mom says from behind the cameraman.

Susie turns to her. “Good morning, Mrs. Denton. I see that you’ve vacated the house within the two-week window that the government gave you.”

Mom’s doing her
nodding and smiling
thing, but her eyes are shooting lasers.

“As we speak, the grand jury is meeting to decide whether to indict your husband on charges of embezzlement and theft with intent to defraud. Do you have any comment?”

Mom gives me a split-second glance that I read as
“Not a word,”
and turns her icy stare back to Susie. She shakes her head, says nothing.

Susie presses, “Are you leaving town, or will you be remaining in the community?”

Mom moves to the driver’s side and opens the door. She tosses her purse onto the seat, gets in, and cranks up the air conditioner.

Susie leans into the car. She’s so close to me that I can see the line where her makeup ends on the underside of her jaw. “Do you still believe that your husband is the ‘family values’ candidate?”

Mom starts rolling up the window on Susie, who freaks out a little. “Hey!” She jerks backward.

Mom leaves the window open about a fourth of the way from the top. She speaks loudly above the blasting air conditioner. “I do have one comment for you, if you’d like it.”

Susie lunges toward the window, her eyes just above the glass. “Yes?”

“You have thirty seconds to move that van before I call the competing news station and give an
exclusive
interview.” Mom glances at her watch. “Your time starts…now.”

When Susie doesn’t budge, Mom pulls her phone out of her purse, appears to press some numbers, and says, “Yes, I need the number for KVUE in Dallas, Texas…thank you.” She glances at Susie. “It’s ringing.”

Susie’s obviously irritated. “Mrs. Denton, I’m just doing my job, reporting the news. Your husband is a public figure, and, to be honest, most people believe that you
had
to know something was going on. Would you care to dispute that?”

Mom ignores her and speaks into her phone. “Hello, my name is Sonya Denton. I was Miss Texas twenty-two years ago. My husband is Reese Denton, the now former candidate for United States Senate. I’d like to speak to your producer. I have a story for you.” She shoots a look at Susie and adds, “An
exclusive
story.”

Susie squeaks, “You’re really going to give
them
an interview?”

Mom holds up a finger for Susie to wait. “Hi, Stu. You’re the producer, correct?” Mom introduces herself again, then: “Could you hold a moment, please?” She rolls the window more than halfway down and gives Susie an evil grin. “Guess you’ll find out when you see the news tonight, won’t you? Last chance: stop blocking my driveway.”

Susie folds her arms and juts out a hip. “Well, I’m
not
going to move that van. It’s on the street, which is public domain, so—”

Mom shrugs, throws our car into Reverse, zooms back until she clears the front walk, then slams it into Drive and does a one-eighty in the front yard. We fly over the curb and hook a sharp right onto the street, narrowly missing the News Ten van. She brakes long enough to throw her arm out the window and signal to the guys in the moving van to follow us.

“Whew!” Mom tosses her phone into her purse and swipes her hand across her brow.

Drew asks, “What about Stu, Mom?”

“Who’s Stu?”

“Um, the guy you were talking to on the phone? The producer?”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking to anyone,” she states matter-of-factly.

“You mean…you lied?” Drew’s mind is clearly blown. “I thought we weren’t
supposed
to lie.”

I blurt, “Know what, Drew? I’ll bet Aunt Leah won’t mind if you have a puppy.”

“Yay! I want a girl puppy and I’m going to name her Angel. Can I get her today? Please?”

Piney Creek is only about two and a half hours southeast of Dallas, but it may as well be on another planet. The East Texas roads are like roller coasters, rising and falling narrowly between gargantuan pine trees. Reddish-brown sand fills the space between the forests and the road, and huge hawks and black vultures circle overhead.

Pretty soon, I notice a pattern: The highway narrows to two lanes as it approaches a town, everybody hits their brakes when they see the local cop shooting radar, and then they punch the accelerator at the city limit sign. Unlike Northside, there’s no strip shopping centers or gated neighborhoods with names like “Wildwood” with only tiny saplings for trees. Instead, there are real forests as far as I can see, and the tiny towns each seem to have a Dairy Queen and a gas station, but not much else.

A faded billboard lets us know that we’re getting close:

There’s a cartoon possum dressed in a football uniform. He’s baring his pointy teeth, but a speech bubble next to his mouth reads, “Visit for a day! You’ll want to stay!”

I murmur, “Don’t possums play dead?” but Mom doesn’t answer. She’s trying to drive and read the directions she wrote on a paper lunch bag. I take it from her. “You want me to read this to you so we don’t crash into the possum on steroids?”

Mom glances in the rearview mirror at the moving van. “Just watch for the post office. Leah said that if I pass the post office, I’ve gone too far.”

The only buildings I see are the Piney Creek Family Pharmacy, an Exxon, and a David’s grocery. We keep looking for our turnoff, but before we know it, we pass the city limit sign.

Mom sighs. “I didn’t see a post office; did you?”

“It wasn’t one of the three places I counted.” I reread the directions. “We were supposed to turn by the sign that said
Goats for Sale
, right? Maybe there’s more than one place that sells goats around here.” I spy stadium lights in the distance. “I think that might be the football stadium, where the Fightin’ Possums play dead on Friday nights.”

“Ooo-kay…” Mom hooks a U-turn and gives the moving truck time to do the same. We’re nearly to the “Welcome to Piney Creek” sign when Mom exclaims, “Hey!
Goats for Sale
!” She makes an abrupt left onto a narrow asphalt road.

We pass a burned-out double-wide mobile home and a shack with plywood siding that has the back seat of a car on the front porch. It doesn’t look like anyone lives there. Mom hits a pothole. She gasps loudly and slams on her brakes. Two dogs run out from under the porch and bark at us.

The next house has a fenced front yard with no less than thirty dogs in it, many with bald patches and scaly, melty-looking skin. “What’s wrong with those dogs, Mama?” Drew asks worriedly. “This street doesn’t look very nice.”

“Let’s not judge the neighborhood just yet, girls…Leah said she lives at the base of a hill and that if we cross the bridge, we’ve gone too far.”

Mom’s phone rings. “Get that for me, would you?”

I try to answer it, but there’s no signal. “Missed call. Rachel.”

She sighs. “Poor baby. She’s having such a hard time adjusting right now…Oh. My. Goodness.” We slow to a near stop at the sight of a dented white mobile home. There’s aluminum foil in the windows and a big
No Trespassing
sign tacked to a piece of wood over a window on the end of the trailer. The front yard holds old tires, a washing machine, two trucks with their hoods raised, and a speedboat with a tree growing up through the middle of it. But the thing that
really
stands out is the cage—like, a cage-fighting cage—surrounded on all sides by rotting wooden bleachers.

Drew makes more worried sounds. “Please don’t let that be it;
please
don’t let that be it.” I glance back at her; she’s closed her eyes and clasped her hands in prayer.

Mom laughs. “Our trailer is
behind
Aunt Leah’s house, sweetie. She didn’t mention a fighting cage, either.” We take a roller coaster dip down a steep hill and see twin gates with bright orange flowers all over them. “I’m pretty sure this is her driveway. She told me to look for entry gates with trumpet creeper vine on it.” We pull in, and the moving truck follows us down the winding driveway to a small, white, Victorian house with a wraparound porch and a dull gray aluminum roof. A big black-and-white mutt with a spot on its head and a smaller brown and white terrier come trotting out to us. They’re barking but wagging their tails at the same time.

Drew shouts gleefully, “She’s got dogggggs!”

Leah’s seated on the top porch step. She leaps up and skitters down the stairs, waving and smiling.

“Aunt Leah’s wearing a tank top again,” Drew says in her know-it-all voice. “Remember when Aunt Judy said—”

Mom cuts her off. “
Don’t
talk about that!” She pulls in next to Leah’s yellow VW bug and turns to Drew. “It’s very generous of Aunt Leah and Ryan to allow us to live here while I figure things out. It would be unkind to repeat what you heard at the Fourth of July picnic. Do you understand what I’m saying, sweetheart?”

Leah yanks open Mom’s door before Drew can answer. “I’m so glad you decided to come!” Mom gets out of the car. Leah wraps her beefy arms around her and squeezes tight.

“She’s covering Mom in her tattoos!” Drew hisses from the back seat.

I sigh. “Shut up, Drew.” We step out of the car. The late summer heat feels thick and damp—the way it feels in Northside when a storm’s about to hit—but there’s not a cloud in the sky. The dogs lick Drew from head to toe, like they’ve been waiting their whole lives for her to arrive.

Leah smiles. “Looks like Charley and Zeeke made a new friend.”

The moving truck driver approaches us. “You want us to start unloading? I can put the truck right up against the front porch.”

“Not this house—there’s a trailer behind it.” Mom looks to Leah. “Right?”

Leah nods. “Yeah, see the dirt path to the right of the house? You should be able to pull the truck in just fine…If that truck’s full, though…”

Mom’s eyebrows shoot up. “What?”

Leah shrugs. “The trailer’s not that big. Don’t know if all your stuff will fit in there.”

The driver frowns. “I doubt there’s enough room to turn the truck around back there. We may have to unload it all in front of the house, then charge you extra to carry it to the trailer.” He takes off around the corner without waiting for a response.

Mom sounds tired. “Let’s go have a look, shall we?”