Mom slammed her teacup down so hard I thought she’d break it, then she stood up and leaned over Uncle Tinsley. When anyone criticized Mom, she went on the attack, and that was what she did now. She was raising two daughters completely on her own, she said, and they were turning out darned well. He had no idea of the sacrifices she’d made. In any event, she was an independent woman. She had her own music career. She made her own decisions. She wasn’t going to stand here and be judged by her brother, a broken-down old hermit still living in the house where he was born in a dead-end mill town. He’d never even had the wherewithal to get the hell out of Byler, and she had not come back to this godforsaken place to answer to him.
“Get your things, girls,” she said. “We’re going.”
Liz and I glanced at each other, not sure what to say. I wanted to tell Mom how good Uncle Tinsley had been to us, but I was afraid she’d think I was taking his side, and that might make things worse.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Mom asked.
We climbed the stairs to the bird wing.
“Jeez, they hate each other,” I said.
“You’d think they’d at least be polite,” Liz said.
“They’re supposed to be the grown-ups,” I said, and added, “I sort of don’t want to go. We just met the Wyatts, and I really like them.”
“Me, too. But it’s not up to us.”
Uncle Tinsley was sitting at a writing table, scribbling on a piece of paper, when we came downstairs carrying the two-tone deb-phase suitcases. He folded the paper and passed it to Liz.
“The telephone number,” he said. “Byler two-four-six-eight. Call if you need me.” He kissed us each on the cheek. “You two take care of yourselves.”
“Thanks for letting me bury Fido near Aunt Martha,” I said. “At first I thought you were a little grouchy, but now I think you’re neat.”
And then we walked out the door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mom drove as if we were fleeing the scene of a crime, passing cars on the road to Byler and running the stoplight on the south side of town. She was gripping the steering wheel as if her life depended on it and talking a mile a minute. Mayfield had really gone downhill, she said. Mother would have been appalled. It looked like Tinsley had become a complete recluse, though he had always been a bit of a crank. Boy, seeing that place sure brought back memories—bad memories. Same thing with this entire hopeless loser of a town. Nothing but bad memories.
“I like Mayfield,” I said. “I like Byler, too.”
“Try growing up here,” Mom said. She reached into her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes.
“You’re smoking?” Liz asked.
“It’s coming back to this place. It’s made me a little tense.”
Mom lit the cigarette with the car’s push-in lighter. We turned up Holladay Avenue. The Fourth of July was a few days away, and workers were hanging flags from every lamppost.
“God bless America,” Mom said sarcastically. “With everything this country’s done in Vietnam, I don’t see how anyone could be feeling very patriotic.”
We crossed the clanking iron bridge over the river. “I met the Wyatts,” I said.
Mom didn’t respond.
“Aunt Al told me about my dad getting shot.” I bit my lip. “You said he died in an accident.”
Mom took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled. Liz rolled down her window.
“I told you that for your own good, Bean,” Mom said. “You were too young to understand.”
Getting the hell out of Byler was another thing she had done for the good of her daughters, she said. There was no way she was going to let us grow up in a finger-wagging, narrow-minded town where everyone would whisper about me being the illegitimate child of a hotheaded loom fixer who killed someone and then went and got killed himself. “Not to mention that everyone in town saw yours truly as the slut who caused it all.”
“But Mom,” I said, “he was defending your honor.”
“Maybe that’s what he thought he was doing, but he made everything so much worse. By the time it was all over, Charlotte Holladay didn’t have any honor left to defend.” Mom took a long draw on her cigarette. “Charlotte the Harlot.”
Anyway, she went on, she didn’t want to think or talk about the past. She hated it. The past didn’t matter, like where you came from or who you’d been didn’t matter. What mattered was the future: where you were going and who you were going to become. “I’ve figured out the future for us,” she said. “New York City!”
What had happened, she went on, was that she’d been down in San Diego with friends for a little group support, then went on to Baja to spend time alone on the beach looking for signs about what direction to take next. She hadn’t seen any signs, but then she got back to Lost Lake and found Liz’s message about us going off to visit the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse. That, she realized, was the sign. She needed to put California behind her and follow her daughters to the East Coast. She’d rented the U-Haul and thrown most of the stuff from our bungalow inside.