“You want to put your bags in?” Grandmother Billie asked, lifting the trunk lid all the way.
I shook my head, squeezing Marin’s purse closer to my side. The thought of lowering the pocketbook she loved into the motor oil–scented trunk on top of a tangled snake of jumper cables felt too much like ripping out my lungs and jumping up and down on them. I opened the back door and slid inside the car, which also smelled like oil, mixed with something more organic. Grass? Skin? I couldn’t tell.
Grandfather Harold lifted his chin once to acknowledge me, and my stomach clenched with fear as he put the car into drive, Grandmother Billie slamming the trunk and easing herself into the passenger seat in front of me. I didn’t want to go. Please, Ronnie, I begged inside my head, come out and get me. Make it like the movies, where at the last minute the girl is loved after all, and gets saved by the hero. Be the hero, Ronnie. But our motel room door had slowly swung shut, closing the space between me and the last familiar thing in my life. He didn’t even wave good-bye.
“She ain’t hungry,” my grandmother said, her blunt fingers working to find the seat belt as my grandfather pulled away from the curb and into traffic.
“Well, I don’t s’pose she has to eat,” he mumbled.
“She’s just gonna sit there?”
“If that’s what she wants to do. As long as she knows we ain’t stopping halfway down to Joplin for anything. She don’t eat, she don’t eat.”
“Well, we can’t let her starve to death.”
I chewed my lip and listened to them argue about me, as if I were invisible.
We navigated way too slowly toward the highway. If Grandfather Harold was going to insist on driving like this, we would never get to Caster City. Which would be fine with me.
I stared out the window and thought about the time Mom had taken Marin and me to Branson for an all-girls weekend. I’d watched the fields roll by, thinking that southern Missouri was so many worlds away from Elizabeth. As we passed Caster City and the landscape changed, the Ozark Mountains bursting around us, looking untouched and untamed, I had felt so far away from home.
I remembered that there had been a dead, flattened scorpion behind the curtains in our cabin and I’d freaked out, refusing to step down off the couch until Mom had checked the whole cabin over. But Marin had been fascinated by the bug.
“It’s got poison?” she kept asking, and when Mom would answer, “I don’t know, honey. Some scorpions are poisonous,” Marin would crouch low, her butt hanging inches from the floor, her bare toes pushed into the nap of the carpet, cords of her hair dangling down past her knees, and would stare at it. A few seconds later, she would look up. “Is it the poison kind?” And Mom, checking under a couch cushion or in the linen closet, would absently repeat, “I don’t know, honey.”
At one point, Marin was crouched so low her nose was between her knees and I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed off the couch and snuck up behind her.
“It moved! It moved!” I shrieked, bumping her in the back with my knees and making her pitch forward.
Marin had shrieked, catching herself just short of falling over, and had shot straight up and run out of the room, bawling her eyes out while I laughed.
“Really, Jersey, did you have to?” Mom said, exasperatedly chasing after my sister.
Marin had spent the whole rest of the weekend terrified, crying and running from every bug she saw.
Sitting in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, heading toward the part of the state where I’d seen my first and only scorpion, I thought about how I’d done that to her. I’d taken away her fascination and replaced it with fear. She’d died scared of bugs, because that was how I’d shaped her.
Without thinking, I reached into her purse and pulled out another stick of gum, cramming it into my mouth with the first. I spread the foil out on my knee and drew a picture of a stick figure crouched over a little black blotch on the ground.
Marin loves scorpions, I wrote. I liked that truth better. I folded up the foil and dropped it in with the others, then leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the chain stores and strip malls fade away into the fields and farms that were to become my new reality.
Neither of my grandparents bothered to shake me awake. Instead, they relied on the slamming of their doors—whoomp! whoomp!—to alert me that we’d stopped. I lifted my head from the window, wiping my damp cheek on my shoulder, and blinked the parking lot into focus. My grandfather had come around the car and was standing next to my grandmother, both of them staring at the doors of a grungy-looking diner.
After a few seconds, my grandmother turned and bent to look in the car window. “You comin’ in?” she said, her voice muffled by the closed window.
I didn’t answer, didn’t move. Wasn’t sure how to do either one. So she simply nodded once and turned away. Together, they walked into the restaurant without me.
I shook my head and gave a disgusted little snort.
I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t hungry—my stomach was too tied in knots to even think about eating—and I really didn’t want to have to try to make conversation over dinner with these two people. But it had been days since I’d had any sort of real meal, and I knew that now it was up to me to make sure I did things like eat and shower and sleep. Nobody else was going to care.
My grandparents were sitting at a table near the restrooms, side by side, their shoulders touching. Who does that? I thought. What couple doesn’t sit across from each other so they can talk? But then I decided that I was just as happy it wouldn’t be my shoulder grazing against one of theirs, and I slid into the chair across from my grandmother.
“We already ordered,” she said by way of greeting, but the waitress had appeared, carrying two glasses of iced tea, which she plunked down in front of my grandparents. “Didn’t think you were coming.”
“That’s okay, sweetie, I haven’t put the order in yet. Need a menu?” the waitress asked. Something about the softness in her eyes reminded me of Mom, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to hold myself back from crying out or flinging my arms around her waist. Maybe in my movie, the waitress could be the hero who loves the girl after all. Save me!
“No, that’s okay,” I managed. “I’ll have a burger and fries. Some water.”
“Sure,” she said, and took off.
“Now, I don’t know how your mom did things, but don’t you go expecting to eat a lot of fancy dinners out,” Grandfather Harold said, his voice deep and ragged, the kind of voice that would scare a little kid. Hell, the kind of voice that was already scaring me.
I didn’t know how to respond. If they thought my life with Mom had been fancy after their son abandoned us, they were crazy.
“And don’t be expecting any fancy dinners at home, either,” Grandmother Billie said, frowning at the saltshaker, which she turned in circles between her hands. Almost like she was nervous. What did she have to be nervous about? “And you’ll be cooking some of them yourself, so don’t be expecting to be waited on. We run a house, not a hotel. Everyone pitches in.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice a squeak.
“Yes, ma’am,” my grandfather corrected.
The waitress brought my water, and I picked it up and sipped it, grateful to have something to cool down my burning cheeks.
“Don’t drink too much,” Grandfather Harold said. Lecturing must have been his strength. “We don’t plan to stop again until we get home. You got an emergency, you’ll have to hold it.”