CHAPTER ONE

MILA KINSLOW

(Excerpted from interview #MC1803/D)

I remember spending my sweet sixteenth birthday watching the lights flash on the Ferris wheel far below us, and the long line of cars idling outside those gates, waiting to get inside the fairgrounds. We was sitting on the porch of the old house, Momma and me, and she was having a cigarette and drinking rye whiskey out of a Bell jar in the same rusted-out metal rocking chair that Granddad used to sit in. I would have given almost anything to join those folks down there, but me and Momma never had two nickels to spare. My birthday gift that year was that Mr. Seely down at the café let me off from my job as a waitress there a whole hour early.

It was pretty nice, really. They stuck a candle in some whipped cream that they squirted from a can onto a strawberry waffle. They sang me that Happy Birthday song, then tipped me out, and let me go home after I blew out the candle. I don’t remember what I wished for, but I had pretty much gave up on wishes by then anyways.

My momma had been pretty once, I heard. Kinda funny that it never occurred to me before that she might have ever been young, or ever had any real dreams of her own. These days she spent most of her time smoking Viceroy cigarettes and staring out at the haze that would settle across the valley like a threadbare cotton blanket. I never knew what she was thinking about, and never had the thought to ask her, not that she would have answered me. It seemed like as time went along she just got soft around the middle, and real, real hard on the inside. Sometimes her eyes would sort of shine with this faraway expression, then go blank and she’d drift off to sleep.

I was seventeen when she died. I guess she didn’t really die so much as kind of fade out, you know, like that last star in the morning when the sun bleaches the dark away and turns everything to blue?

Anyways, I found her laying there on the couch that morning, so I called the doctor who drove all the way up from town just to pronounce her dead, which I had already told him she was, then he phoned the mortuary and asked them to come pick up her body. I hadn’t had a chance to cry, didn’t even feel like it yet, and later on I ended up feeling pretty bad about that. I asked the doctor what I was supposed to do next, and he said since I was underage, I was probably going to be moved into a foster home if I didn’t have no relatives to stay with, which I didn’t. My choices became pretty clear to me at that point.

I wasn’t going to stick around there for no foster care. I’d heard enough about the sick shit that happened to girls my age.

I gathered up my favorite stuff and crammed it into a beat-up old American Tourister suitcase that was tucked in the back of Momma’s closet, then I took out the grocery money we kept stashed inside a Hills Bros. coffee can in the fridge, and lit out for the bus station before the authorities could come and collect me up. I couldn’t even risk sticking around for her funeral, not that anybody’d show up for it. I still feel kinda bad about that too. But there wasn’t likely to be no casseroles waiting for me on the stoop afterward.

No, I didn’t have no burning urge to run off and be a movie star or beauty queen or something. It was more like an animal instinct to protect myself, like if I stayed around Tennessee too long I would end up stuck right there forever just like Momma had been, slowly dying from a low-grade fever or an infection that would just swallow me up whole in a gray shadow or a cloud of cigarette smoke or a tangle of cheap, sweaty sheets.

I stuffed fifteen bucks into the pocket of my jeans for later, and took the rest of what I’d grabbed from the coffee can and handed it over to the man at the ticket counter for the Continental Trailways. I asked him how far that cash would take me and he made a scrunched-up look with his face and checked the schedule. He had these weird purple veins on his cheeks that looked like a bunch of itty bitty bugs had crawled up under there and made a nest, and I tried not to stare at him while he studied on that schedule.

He looked down at me and counted out my money again, then told me I could get as far as Phoenix or Denver or LA.

I picked LA because I’d never seen the ocean before.

Kinda wish I’d picked Denver instead.