It 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.