The Great Good Summer (14 page)

“Mama, stop!” I shout. And before I've even figured out what else to say, Mama jams on the brakes and veers over to the side of the road.

“What? What?” She looks from side to side, all panicky.
“What, Ivy?
What
is the matter?” Like she's wondering if we almost had an accident with a car she hadn't seen.

I purposely look at Mama sort of sideways so I don't have to look at Paul, too. “We have to turn around, Mama. I'm sorry.”

“Ivy . . . ,” says Paul from the backseat, and I think,
This is why I'm not looking at you, so you can't stop me the way you did back in the booth at the restaurant.

“Paul, wait,” I say. “Mama? We have to go to Cape Canaveral. That's why Paul's even here in the first place. I mean, along with keeping me company while I looked for you. And I'm sorry I scared you, but this is really important. He's getting grounded for nothing if we don't make it to Cape Canaveral.”

“Cape Canaveral? Florida?”

“Yes.” I peek back toward Paul and lift my eyebrows in a sort of silent warning to just go along with me. Which feels a little funny, being bossy when I'm actually trying to be nice, but taking charge is all I can think of to do. “That's right,” I say. “Cape Canaveral, Florida. Where the space shuttle lives,” I say.

If we can just get Mama to say yes without too much discussion about how it's time to get home and how worried Daddy is and how Cape Canaveral is clear
across Florida, we'll be fine. Once we're back on the road, I think she'll keep going just to be polite to Paul.

I guess Paul read my eyebrow warning right, because he says, “Yep, the space shuttle. We were hoping to go, but I mean . . .”

I can tell he's about to give in again—I can hear it in his voice—but I won't let him. Not this time. “You know how the space shuttles are retiring, Mama? Well, the idea was, since we were gonna be in Florida anyway, we would just sort of run on over there to see one. Or at least to see where they used to launch them. Or something.”

“Oh my. Oh my goodness. This is a change of plans,” says Mama. As if everything else we've been doing has been all plotted out. She sits with her hands on the wheel and looks out the window toward where we
were
going. Paul and I sit too, and wait.

“Well.” Mama clears her throat. “I'm not exactly certain where Cape Canaveral is, so let's look it up on the map. And also, we'll need to get back in touch with Max, and with your mom and dad, Paul, before we set off to do another thing. Oh dear. Well, okay,” she says.

Which, you have to admit, sounds an awful lot like yes.

“So if we find it on the map, and call home, then you're fine with it? Is that right, Mama?”

Mama's whole body shivers, and she reaches out to turn off the air-conditioning that's been blowing hard while we sit here in the sun. “Well,” she says, “I didn't know a thing about this arrangement, but it seems only fair to you, Paul. And maybe it could be my way of making things up to the two of you. At least a little. After everything. Okay?”

Okay? Yes, yes, and amen yes. This is indeed okay, because I know my mama, and she will not go back on her word. She may have run off to Florida with a crooked preacher and forgotten her blood pressure medication and left behind her phone and scared us half to death, but she will always, no matter what, keep her word.

Even once she discovers where Cape Canaveral really is.

Chapter Eighteen

A
ccording to Paul, Mrs. Dobbs thinks a side trip to Cape Canaveral “sounds fine,” which I'm pretty sure means she'll allow it because she's too distinguished to kick up a fuss. My mama doesn't say anything, but she does give Paul's hand a little squeeze when he gives her back her phone, and I love her for that.

I also love her for saying that she'll explain our detour to Daddy so I don't have to. Because honest to goodness, if I have to hear his laugh-cry one more time, I might give up completely on Cape Canaveral, even though it was originally my idea.

It's after we've worked everything out—Daddy, the map, the plan—and we're on the highway again but turned around the other way, that Paul says, out of the blue from the backseat, “Thanks, Ivy.”

I'm about this close to saying, “Thanks for what?” when I look down at the map in my lap, with a new circle drawn around Cape Canaveral, and I nod.

“No problem,” I say. And really, it isn't.

For the next couple of hours, Mama gets us to tell her every little thing about our “escapade.” That's what she's calling our trip to Florida, an escapade. I think it's supposed to make all of us feel better. Which it does, and so does telling the story with Paul. We make it funnier than it was, even the fainting and throwing-up part, and the losing the money part, and the Skinny Ricky and Hallelujah Dave part. Mama actually laughs a lot, and so do we.

Paul compares our trip to one big experiment and says we were following the scientific method all the way along. Mama believes him. He makes it so that I practically believe him, even though I was there and I don't remember following any particular method at all.

When we stop to get gas, I go into the ladies' while Mama pumps and pays. And it's in that hot, tiny, hold-your-breath bathroom that I suddenly realize something: Mama has not told us one itty-bitty thing about her own summer or Hallelujah Dave or The Great Good Bible Church of Panhandle Florida. I've tried to turn the conversation her way a couple of times, but she keeps turning it back toward us. Which feels like a trick to me, like she's been trying to distract me the way she did when I
was a fussy baby and she'd blow on the mobile hanging over the rocking chair.

That mobile stayed hung until we turned my room into Fluffy Pinksville in third grade, and by then it really
was
distracting—and babyish. And now this trip is starting to feel babyish too, with Mama not telling us anything important and acting like we didn't just make it all the way to Florida on our own. So by the time I get back into the car, I don't care how much I've missed her, or how sweet she's been to Paul, or how easy it was to get her to agree to Cape Canaveral; I'm mad.

“Okay, you little adventurers,” says Mama as we're buckling in, “what do you say we turn on the radio and just ride for a while? The light's changing, and I need to focus on where we're going, which is a good piece farther than I realized.”

She pops a piece of gum into her mouth, pushes the scan button on the radio, and puts the car in gear. And then, as she starts backing out, she mutters, “Sweet goodness and mercy, what will your daddy think when we finally make it home from all this?”

And for me, that's it.

That's just flat-out it.

“What will Daddy think? Really? What do you think
Daddy thought when you abandoned us to go gallivanting all over God's green earth with Hallelujah Dave? What do you think
I
thought when I showed up in Florida and discovered that there
was
no Great Good Bible Church? And that you were in the hospital? And that your fake preacher man with a bun in his hair was in jail?” I hear my voice, and I know it's mine, but it's as if it's gone ahead without me, as if it's motorized and spinning like one of those centrifuges in science class.

Mama stops the car completely, half in and half out of the parking spot, and she clicks the radio back to off. Her face goes all white—she looks worse than she looked when we arrived at the hospital this morning. And I don't care. Or maybe I do care but I can't stop anyway.

“You've been listening to us this whole entire drive so far, as if Paul and I have been away at summer camp or something. But this isn't summer camp, Mama! This is real life, and I left my babysitting job and lied to Daddy and got on a Greyhound bus to Florida, all because of you!”

It is eerily quiet in the car every time I take a breath between words. I think Mama and Paul are every bit as surprised as I am by the words coming out of my mouth.

“Do you know we've been worried about you, Mama?
Do you really know that? And that we missed you? Pastor Lou was right—you forsook us! You were supposed to be like Ruth, Mama, and stick with your family no matter what. That's supposed to be in your moral fiber. What about that, Mama? What do you have to say about that?” I feel the centrifuge in my throat slowing down as a lump moves in and tears fill my eyes.

But Mama? She just sits there, staring at me. She doesn't say a single thing.

“Mama, my God, I'm dead serious here! Wake up!” I shout through the lump and through the silence, and that's when her hand flies up to slap me.

I catch it, just as it's grazing my cheek. I feel a fingernail scratch my skin, and I watch her mouth fall open, like she's just done something she didn't know she was going to do.

“Oh, Ivy. Oh, angel. What in heaven's name is happening to us?” She moves her hand toward me again, more slowly this time, as if to pat or stroke me, but I push away from her, my back pressing against the door.

“I owe you a lot of explaining,” she says. “I know I do. But I also know that I have never in my life heard you speak to me like that, or take the Lord's name in vain. We are good stock, and we don't do that, Ivy. It only makes
things worse, and things are quite clearly bad enough already.”

The car hums under us, and my cheek stings. My mama may have never heard me talk like that before, but she's never slapped me before either. Why is
she
the one who suddenly gets to be mad here? I feel my eyes, hot and heavy with the tears I do not want her to see. I can't stand it, not even for another second. I twist around and pull at the door handle and start to jump out of the car. Mama grabs on to my sweatshirt and then on to my actual shoulder.

“No,” says Mama.

The car rolls backward a bit. Mama steps hard on the brake, and all of us jerk in our seats. I kick my feet out toward the pavement.

And suddenly Paul says, “Wait, Ivy. Stop. Stop!”

But I don't.

“You care more about a God you don't even know than you do about me!” I shout at Mama over my shoulder. And then I step out completely and slam the door with all my might.

Chapter Nineteen

I
run hard across the parking lot, which turns into a bunch of other parking lots all strung together. I run past stores and salons and restaurants with their huge signs, and I run past shopping carts all lined up. I run past big concrete gardens of hard dirt and spiny-looking palm trees. I run past a little red car that has to stop for me because I don't stop for it.

I run and I run and I run, and while I run, I yell. I yell at Mama and at Hallelujah Dave. I yell at Daddy and at God and at Pastor Lou and at Paul. I run, and I yell. I pound out every angry thought I've ever had as I run and run and yell and yell and my eyes and my lungs and my insides burn. I keep on running even after there's nothing to yell about anymore. I keep on running until my breaths turn into gasps and the bottoms of my feet hurt and I reach the concrete wall that marks the end of all these parking lots.

And then I stop. I press my hands up to the concrete and I come to a lurching, gasping stop. I have no choice
because from here there's nowhere else to go. I'm done running and done burning, and everything inside me suddenly tumbles down toward my feet, just plain crumbles, like a church turning to ash.

I don't have a money pouch. I don't have a phone. I don't have a map. And right now it really, truly feels like I don't have a mama.

My whole sweaty, tired body leans up against the retaining wall, and I close my eyes for a long time. It feels like almost forever, really, just standing here. Not yelling, not crying, not even thinking. The setting sun shines bright against my eyelids, and I feel itchy and puffy and red. And tired. I'm really, really tired.

When I finally open up my eyes, there is nothing to do but turn around and start the hot walk back to the car. And as I do, there's Paul, coming across the parking lot toward me. He moves slowly, like this is not an emergency at all, like everything is fine. And then do you know what he does? He lifts his hand and waves. Like we've just bumped into each other at the mall or something. Just a little wave, that for some reason makes me laugh. I wave back.

“I'm kind of stuck here, I guess. I mean, I can't really go anywhere. I don't have a phone or a ride or any money,”
I say when we're close enough to hear each other.

“Yeah, I know.” Paul stops and turns around when I reach him, so he can walk with me.

“Sorry about all this,” I say.

“I think it's really your mom who's sorry,” says Paul. He swings his arm out in front of me to stop me from walking straight into a pickup truck. Once it passes, I see our rental car, on the other side of the gas station, parked at a weird angle with the driver's door hanging open.

“She's not acting very sorry.”

“Yeah, I know,” Paul says again.

As we get closer, I can see that Mama is not
in
the rental car. The door's hanging open, and I think the car is even running, but Mama's not there.

“Um, where is she?” I ask.

“Looking for you.”

Paul and I wait in the car till Mama gets back. She's panting, like she ran as hard as I did. She's panting and red. She gets in and pulls shut the door.

“I'm so sorry, Ivy,” she says. “So sorry.” And then she pulls tight on the steering wheel, backs out of the parking space, and starts to drive.

She leans forward as if it's hard to see, never mind
that it's not dark yet and the window is clean. Paul is completely silent in the backseat, and I lean up against the door, as far away from everyone as I can possibly be, considering the fact that we're cooped up in a car together.

We drive for nearly an hour, but it feels twice that long without a word from anyone. Finally Mama says, “I know it's up to me to break the ice here, but I don't know where to start except by saying I'm sorry again.”

Which does seem like the right place to start, but I don't say so.

“I made a lot of mistakes, Ivy, including slapping you. That's what people do. We make mistakes. Terrible, awful, stupid mistakes. And I've mixed you up in mine. I could talk you through everything, every crazy thought I've ever had and every stupid thing I've ever done, but no story will really fix it all.”

I don't say “yes” or “okay” or “I know.” I don't even turn her way. I've said everything I need to say. It's Mama's turn now.

“I hope you can forgive me sometime, Ivy. In the meantime I have to work on forgiving myself. And then it's up to God. That's the really awful thing about this whole mess—I was just trying to get closer to God, which makes it even
a bigger shame that I messed up as badly as I did.”

I still don't turn to look at her, but I listen. I think Paul's listening too.

I mean, really, what choice do we have?