Sway (20 page)

I
t was Misery all the way to Kentucky.

What my mom had done was terrible, but not just regular villain terrible. It was something that was wonderful turned terrible. Like a teddy bear that grew fangs. Mom didn't
have
to leave us. She
wanted
to leave us. To live in a place that's not Alabama and do something that's not SMART with a man who's not Douglas and a son who's not an orphan. And she was there right then not missing me.

Dad reached over and patted my leg. He must have been talking to me for a while.

“Hey, Cass, you okay?”

“Not really.”

“Well, just bear with me until I can locate that special stop I mentioned,” he said. “It's a place your mom and I always used to talk about taking you someday. When we bought our little Castanea dentata tree, the man at the nursery told us about it. I think it's not far from here.”

How could he bring up my massacred tree at a time like this? I wondered.

“You ran over the Castanea dentata,” I said.

Despite being totally aware of the fact that Dad hadn't meant to smash my tree, I still felt like he needed to do some non-surplus suffering for his carelessness.

“I know, and I'm sorry,” said Dad. “But this may very well make up for it.”

The two words
make up
repeated again and again in my head.

“Just a sec,” I said, darting to the back of the RV.

“I'll be here,” Dad called out behind me.

I went straight to my room and snatched up the pink plastic beauty box, suddenly seeing it in a new light. No wonder Mom was so foo-foo this last trip home. All tan and flippy-flowy and shimmery. She had made herself that way for a start-over life with her new family. It wasn't just the idea that disgusted me so, but mainly how long it had taken me to realize it.

Without a second thought, I marched right into the tiny bathroom, set the box on the floor, flipped it open, and expanded out the tiers. Then, one by one, I emptied every lotion, puffed out every powder, broke off every lipstick, and crumbled out every shadow right into the toilet. By the time I finally pressed the handle, it looked like I was flushing a melted clown. The bowl was so smeared with bronze goo and flecked with chunks of shimmery chartreuse and goldenrod, it took three flushes to get it all gone. As soon as I stood back up, I caught a good look at my huffy-puffy, beauty-wrecking self in the mirror. And that's when I discovered something that you might call the exclamation point to my day. It was my first-ever
zeeyut
, and boy was it ever red, obnoxious, and shiny. Not only that, but there I stood, with all hope of fixing it getting slurped down the toilet.

Soon, the flushing sound was replaced by the simple humming of the bathroom light and the clang of regret in my brain. The noises filled my head so completely that when I heard a buzzing coming up from the floor, I thought it was just more of the same. That is, until I noticed the green glow of the cell phone screen shining up from the bottom level of the beauty box. I stooped to take a closer look at the phone, which was the only thing that remained in the box at all. When the 239 area code on its little screen made me instantly queasy, I swallowed big and did what I had to do. I pushed the ignore button.

By the time Dad and I made it to Overlook, Kentucky, I'd lint-rolled most of the makeup chunks off myself and managed to totally anger the zeeyut with a lot of poking. I'd also wriggled my tank top off of me out from under my T-shirt and stuffed it in the middle tier of the beauty box. Then I skulked up to the front and slid into the passenger seat, scaring myself a little as I caught a glimpse of my red forehead in the side mirror. I saw Dad looking at me from the corner of his eye.

“It's all right,” he said. “That's what yellow visors are for.”

So I found the visor and stuffed it down onto my head. And Dad was right. Uncomfortable as it was rubbing on my tender skin, it covered the bump just fine.

“Mom called back,” I said.

Dad's eyes widened.

“And?” he said.

“And I don't need any surplus suffering.”

Dad looked instantly calm again, and after that, things went totally quiet for a while between us. He asked me a couple of times if I wanted some lunch, but I'd kind of forgotten what hunger even felt like, so I just kept shrugging him off.

“Yeah, I've lost my appetite too,” he said. “I'll just stop and see if the folks at this greasy spoon can point us the right way.”

We stopped at a diner where music-note decals were peeling up off the windows and a cross-stitched sign at the entrance said,
That which doesn't fill us only makes us hunger
. The place had minty toothpicks, red spinning stools, and a cashier who called me “Shoogie.” While Dad chatted with her about driving directions, I leaned on the jukebox and scanned the numbered lists of song choices, looking for the one that matched up with that Florida area code.
Two-three-nine.
Whatever the selection might be, good or bad, I would have to play it, and it would forever remind me of Toodi Bleu. I ran my finger across two columns of songs, and then, through the cloudy, yellowed glass, there it was.

239

Take The Long Way home

SuperTramp

I'd never even heard the song before, but the title alone sounded like the story of my life: a girl and her dad take the long way home to try and forget that the girl's mom might never take any way home at all.

J
ust seconds after my quarter plinked against the insides of the jukebox, the song's slow, lonesome beginning made me feel all kinds of miserable.

“Come on, Cass.” Dad was standing beside the register, writing directions on a sugar packet. When I walked up next to him, the pen poked right through the paper and spilled a little pile of granules on the counter.

“Good news,” he said. “We don't have far to go.”

Our next stop was so close, it was no wonder our directions fit on that tiny packet. My toothpick hadn't even lost its minty flavor by the time we reached the place, which was really nothing but a clump of forest, marked by a sign that looked like the words had been burned into it. The one-lane road closed in around The Roast tight like a green sleeve. We passed through a collection of trees that were the tallest I'd ever seen, until we got deeper into the forest and saw some even bigger. One that looked like the great-granddaddy of them all stood over to the right, with an orange rope around it. There was no one else around, so Dad and I stopped right in the middle of the road and got out. The tip of the tree seemed to disappear into the slow-drifting clouds.

“Go ahead. Give it a read,” Dad said, pointing to a plaque on the ground between the tree's roots. It said:

The
Castanea dentata
is characterized by the large saw-teeth on the edges of its leaves, as indicated by the scientific name
dentata
, which is Latin for “toothed.” Commonly called the American chestnut, the tree is a prolific bearer of nuts, usually with three nuts contained in each spiny green burr. This, the largest surviving
Castanea dentata
tree in Kentucky, measures 32 inches wide and 86 feet tall.

I had no idea a Castanea dentata could even sprout leaves, much less grow to be such a giant. I looked all the way up its trunk until my neck hurt. Like I could have flopped right on over into a backbend just to see it all.

“Wow,” I said.

“Really something, huh?” said Dad. He picked one of the loose burrs off the ground and pried it open. “Check this out, Cass. See those three nuts in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let's say, hypothetically, of course, that one of those nuts were to go away.”

“To Florida?”

“Wherever a misguided nut sees fit to go.”

He thumped hard at one of the seeds and sent it bouncing across the forest floor. “I bet even with that one nut gone, we could plant this here burr and grow us a new Castanea dentata that would make this big tall tree look just like your toothpick. Who knows? Maybe it will be the Alabama state champion by the time you and I are both gray-headed. You think?”

“It reaches out so wide,” I said.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder real light and cautious, like he expected a static electricity shock.

“And we'll be far-reaching too,” he said. “Me and you together.”

“We will?”

“Sure we will,” he said. “Just us two nuts…and some Sway.”

And some Sway
. His words echoed in my head.

“Let's sit a spell, if you don't mind,” said Dad, and we squatted at the base of the tree.

“Think about it, Cass. You and I have something big in that brown suitcase. Something that can help us get past all this heartache and hurt. Maybe not quickly, and maybe not completely, but it's something pretty good we've begun, right?”

“Right.”

“I mean, just because your mom stopped helping doesn't mean we have to. I'm sure not ready to call it quits on our adventure, are you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “It felt really good to help people…like we did with the Belfusses. It was like all that stuff we did for them was really helping
me
too.”

“Yeah, I'd kind of like to feel some more of that myself,” Dad said, patting me on the knee. “And where there's a will, there's some Sway, no?”

Just the mention of Sway rounded off the sharp-cornered hurt inside me.

“Well, that settles it, then,” said Dad. “Let's camp here in the forest for tonight, and first thing tomorrow we'll get on the road and do us a little sole-searching. Unless, of course, you're weary of the shoe thing.”

The instant sting of Dad's comment made me realize that in a matter of days I'd become kind of attached to the Sneaker Reacher routine.

“No, it's actually pretty fun,” I said, picking at the split in the bottom of my flip-flop. “I mean, a rule is a rule, right?”

“I guess you're right.” Dad smiled as he stood and picked the empty burrs from his behind. He held out his hand to help me up, and passed the little green seedy one into my palm. On the way back to The Roast, I held the burr just tight enough to keep it from dropping and from prickling me too much. When we got there, Dad grumbled about the fresh coat of sticky specks along the sides and front of the RV.

“Sappy Castanea dentata,” he said.

Sappy Dad, I thought as I wrapped the little seed burr in a tissue and nested it gently into my cup holder.

That night, through my moonroof, I could see a rectangle's worth of Castanea dentata branches silhouetted against the sky. Being that close to my magnificent namesake inspired me so, I lifted the bottom corners of the Eiffel poster and tacked them up with bits of tape torn from the lint roller. Sharpie in hand, I got to work, at first just outlining a simple, fat tree trunk under the big SWAY that was already there. The tree grew as I added twisted roots to the bottom and a scattering of crooked limbs to the top, drawing more feverishly as I considered the distinct possibility that Sway could very well make Cass a far-reaching girl.

Come morning, the canopy of green around us hung dewy and low. With no room to turn The Roast around, Dad backed and beeped us all the way out of those woods. Through the sticky-speckled windshield, I watched the Castanea dentata until nothing was left but its rounded top rising high and lush above the forest. Like nothing in the world could ever bend it.

T
he drive out of Kentucky took half of forever. Out my window, there was nothing to see other than an arrangement of grass pastures and curved fences that made the landscape look like a lush green puzzle. Determined to keep watch as long as possible for a shoe, I focused on the pavement ahead until I got so bleary-eyed, everything looked like a shoe to me, including the liquid shapes inside my own eyelids.

“The weigh station back there said we're in Patakatish, Tennessee,” said Dad, trying four different ways to pronounce
Patakatish
. Shortly after, we passed a rickety gray barn with the words fireworks, flea market, and fruit painted across what was left of the roofing. Across the road, there was an Econo Lodge, a post office, and a Ford dealership. We must have been in downtown Patakatish.

Dad hung a Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight into the gravel lot of Heap Big's Powwow Fireworks Mart, Flea Market, and Fruit Stand, toppling our coffee table and dealing our stack of old magazines across the floor like cards. He pulled up between a red-and-white-striped tent and a blow-up Indian twice as tall as The Roast. I wasn't sure if it was the fireworks, the fleas, or the fruit Dad was after.

“I've got a hankering for something sweet,” said Dad, parking on top of the Indian's air supply and making him sag right across my side of The Roast. “You want something too?”

“Sure,” I said.

Then I waited, eye to belly button with the tall Indian until Dad walked back across the lot looking like the top of his head was smoking. He climbed in holding a honeydew half with one lit sparkler sticking out of it.

“The firework came with the food,” he said with a shrug, the sparkler smoking up the cab of The Roast until we both coughed. Once we'd fanned the air enough to breathe again, Dad did a fist-rub on his eyes and said, “Cass, are you seeing what I'm seeing?”

He slurped at the edge of an enormous iced coffee.

“What?” I said.

“Just over there,” he said. “By that big trash bin.”

Dad pointed his long coffee stirrer at a scattering of garbage overflow on the ground, right next to the fireworks tent. Lo and behold, there rested the filthiest, mangiest, one-and-a-half-eared bunny slipper ever.

Uck
, was all I could think. I sure enough had wanted to find us a shoe and see what kind of Sway I could brew up that day as McClean's willing and able Cassistant. But still,
uck
.

“Seek the Reacher, Cass! We've got a fluffy one off the port bow.” Dad leaned out his own window to fish the slipper in, since mine was blocked by an inflatable Indian belly. It took him five throws to hook the bunny, but the bunny didn't want to come. So, together, Dad and I used all four hands and yanked the Reacher, all curved up under the strain, like we were catching a whale. We both almost fell backward when the thing finally pulled loose and came flying. As Dad dragged the slipper across the parking lot and dangled it up into The Roast, a family with eight kids in matching clothes stood gawking across the way. They snapped pictures of us with throwaway cameras.

With a wince, Dad unhooked the bunny, its fur all matted with paper bits from spent firecrackers. The sour-milk-and-licorice smell of the slipper gave me instant juicy jaws, like when Syd once talked me into trying his Tuna-Cruller Surprise. Soon as Dad looked into its one cloudy eye, what I knew I was thinking and what I thought my dad was thinking were definitely one and the same.
Let's throw this one back.

“You know,” said Dad, sniffing his fingertips, “I don't recall any rule that says we have to
keep
the shoe.”

I would have actually said something in agreement if I hadn't had to breathe in to make myself talk. For the moment, a grateful nod would have to do. Then, in one swift motion, Dad lifted the bunny up and out. And I just had to smile inside. Disgusting as our short time together had been, that bunny did mean something sudsy was about to happen.

“So where are we going to take the soaps this time?” I said, chewing on a piece of smoked honeydew.

“Well,” Dad said, scanning the surrounding area. “This may very well be all there is to Patakatish. Besides, I see lots of people over there at the flea market, and where there are people, there are problems. I say let's make Sway while the sun shines.” He was already up and gathering all things green and yellow.

He grinned at me and said, “That is, if you're ready to stand tall and reach out.”

“Almost ready,” I said, flipping my mirror down and adjusting my visor into a comfortable zeeyut-covering position.

M. B. McClean buttoned his jacket, licked his thumb, and tried unsuccessfully to bend down and wipe his smudgy golden shoe buckle, before unbuttoning his jacket and going for it a second time. I felt truly glad to see him all suited up uh-
gane
. If there was one thing this M. B. McClean character was good at, it was making me forget heartache for a little while.

“Anything I can help with?” Dad slid out the suitcase and the wagon with a few grunts and snorts.

“Not really,” I said, giving up and tossing the visor onto the gear shift. “But it's all right. I'm ready.”

Me and M. B. McClean and all our necessities had to come out the driver's side of The Roast. Suitcase, wagon, and tambourine, all present and accounted for. Since we planned on wandering through the crowd, we left the banner and table behind.

The flea market was inside a big metal building in a field behind the fireworks tent and the fruit stand. The afternoon heat sent wavy wigglies rising up off the cars parked on the grass, making the crowd in the distance look all melty.

“How will we fill the wagon?” I said. McClean pretended he was pouring his giant coffee into it.

“The fruit stand has a hose pipe,” he said. “The question is, how are we going to display our soaps for people to see?”

“I know,” I said. “We could use your belt to make a strap, and I can wear the open suitcase on the front of me.”

“Great idea,” said McClean. “It's not like I need it to hold these pants up.”

“And can I make some soap suggestions for people this time?” I asked. “I did a lot of studying our list the other night.”

“Sure thing,” he said. “I'll be the wagon-dragger.”

Water-gathering and suitcase-strapping made for a slow journey across the long field to the flea market, but I felt energized to be the one in charge of the magic. Once inside the building, M. B. McClean and I wasted no time putting ourselves and what was left of our Sway right out there in the midst of the shoppers. We'd made it just beyond the third booth when we heard someone call out, “Hey! Ol' boy with the top hat! Hold up!”

McClean and I squeezed our way over to the display booth we'd just passed, where a man was barely balancing on a rocking chair to flag us down. The man wore a satiny gold exhibitor ribbon pinned to his shirt. “The name's Roy, of Roy Biddum's Antiques,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you, Roy. I'm M. B. McClean, and this is my partner, Cass.”

“What you got there in the case?” he said.

“Soap slivers,” said McClean.

“
Magic
soap slivers,” I added.

“You don't say,” said Roy, sounding intrigued.

“Yeah,” I said. “They belonged to famous historical people. When you wash your hands with one, you become sort of like that person.”

McClean nodded along proudly. Roy Biddum squenched his lips to the side. While he seemed to be eyeballing the old brown suitcase far more than the soaps themselves, I took a moment to peruse his own merchandise. I could tell even from a short distance that his booth was filled with unscratched furniture, Civil War relics that were lots shinier than the real ones I'd seen, and framed, autographed pictures that looked like they'd been torn right out of magazines.

“Historical soap, huh?” he said, pulling a fat roll of dollar bills from his apron. “Tell you what. I'll give you twenty bucks for the whole collection, including the suitcase. I can package them all up real nice as collector's items.”

“Oh no, they're not for sale,” said McClean.

“Twenty-five bucks, then.”

“No, I mean we're not selling them. We're giving them away.”

“Well, that makes things simple,” said Roy, with a sly smile. “Then I'll just take them off your hands.”

He reached for the suitcase, but the suitcase and I took a giant step back.

“Sorry,” said McClean. “But we're saving them for people truly in need of their power.”

Roy did a snide little snicker. “All right then. So tell me, what's the oldest one you got in there?”

McClean nervously fumbled through the slivers and came up with a bumpy, creamish
A L
soap.

“Well, a lot longer than fourscore and seven years ago, this one was used by Abraham Lincoln.” As McClean held the soap in the air, I had a sudden flashback to that day in the kitchen when Dad showed me and Mom the soap that bore Abraham Lincoln's likeness, the one Mom had made a wish on. Before I could take a closer look, though, Roy fwipped that sliver from McClean's grasp and squatted at the water wagon so fast and so close the air tasted like cologne.

“Magic, huh?” He stuck his hands into the water and rubbed and scrubbed with a vengeance.

“Well then, how come there ain't nothin' happening?” he said louder. “How come I don't feel no different at all?”

Roy straightened up, tossed what was left of the sliver into the dirt, and squashed it with his foot. Right away, I felt like shouting and tackling him to the ground, but I mustered just enough sense to leave that job to M. B. McClean. Unfortunately, M. B. McClean just stood there openmouthed and still, reminding me more of my old dad than ever.

“Here's the deal, Mr. Clean,” Roy said, flapping his exhibitor ribbon like a little frayed flag. “You guys don't have one of these, and if you don't have one of these, then what you got ain't welcome here.”

Roy kicked the remains of the smushed soap under a table.

“And regarding that crud you're calling magic, my green-and-yellow friend, consider it a favor I'm doing you, keeping you from embarrassing yourself today.”

I felt sure McClean would at least have something clever to say about that, and maybe even rhyme it, but neither happened.

“Enough said,” Dad muttered. “Come on, Cass. Let's be on our way now.”

As we bumped and scooted to turn ourselves around in the tight crowd of shoppers that had pressed in around us, all I could think was how in the world an antique dealer with a boothload of counterfeit junk had the guts to tell us that our stuff was crud. How a man selling rusty, dusty fakes for hundreds of dollars could harass us for giving real, powerful antiques away. After all, what had Roy Biddum's ancestors passed down to him? Nothing but a sour face and bitter words.

McClean and I walked through the flea market exit with Roy still calling out behind us, “Hey! I got a soap sliver for you in my own bathtub at home! Belonged to Roy Biddum. You can have it and all the chest hairs stuck to it for only ten cents!”

Neither one of us turned to looked at Mr. Biddum again. The hateful, spitty sound of his voice alone was enough to make me wish we'd never even stopped in Patakatish, Tennessee.