I dried off and put the dress on, my hair shedding little drops of water.
Sheila walked in, put her hands on her hips, and shook her head. “If you don’t look just like a picture, I don’t know what does.”
She stood me in front of the mirror and began brushing my hair, which is not an easy thing to do because my hair has always been the knottiest. It’s like trying to straighten out an animal’s nest. I usually give up on it and let it go wherever it wants. Sheila draped a dry towel around me and got out the scissors. What was supposed to be just a trim around the edges became a major cut because of all the tangles and knots, but I loved the way it looked and couldn’t wait for Dad to see it.
“Let’s do one more thing,” Sheila said.
She sat me on the bed and put my feet on a folding chair and clipped my nails. Then she got out the prettiest pink nail polish I’d ever seen and went to work on my toenails. She put cotton balls in between my toes until the polish dried. She did my fingernails too, then put a little blush on my cheeks. To top it off, she’d bought a necklace that had a red flower in the middle just like the ones on the dress.
I was in front of the mirror looking at myself with her putting on the necklace when the engine of the RV cranked once or twice and then fired to life. Dad let out a whoop that we heard from the open window, and Sheila’s face scrunched up like she’d just heard a car crash.
She fluffed out my new hairdo and smiled. “Let’s go start dinner.”
Dad changed clothes and looked as happy as I’d seen him in months. Men must feel like they accomplish something when they get a machine working. He took one look at me and his mouth dropped.
“Do you like it?” I said, twirling around and then holding out my fingernails and showing him my sandals.
“Where’d you get all that?” he said.
“Just a few things I picked out at work yesterday,” Sheila said. “Every girl needs a new outfit and shoes.”
He reached out to touch my hair. I think he’d become so used to seeing all the tangles that he couldn’t believe it was so soft and silky. “You sure do clean up good, don’t you?”
Sheila handed him a plate of ground beef, and he went to work. He’d bought onions and peppers and mushrooms and a couple kinds of cheese. He looked almost as happy making the burgers as he did fixing the RV but not quite.
An old truck rumbled up and Mr. Taylor climbed out. Walter ran over to him, wagging his tail and sniffing at his coveralls. Dad says a dog’s nose is so sensitive it can smell things we can only dream about smelling, and it looked to me that Walter was in dog heaven. Mr. Taylor’s clothes were like a full buffet at the Golden Corral. He walked behind the house where the smoke was coming from the grill and talked with Dad awhile. Mostly about what was wrong with the RV and how he fixed the burgers.
When Mr. Taylor saw me standing inside the screen door, he cocked his head like he was meeting a stranger and took off his John Deere hat. “Don’t know that I’ve had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, ma’am.”
I had to laugh at him as I opened the door. “Silly, it’s just me.”
He handed Sheila a jar full of something. “I’ve been waiting for a special occasion to open this. Some chowchow my wife made before she passed. Ought to be good with those burgers—don’t you think?”
Sheila made a fuss about it, but I’d never heard of chowchow before, so I asked what it was. Sheila unscrewed the Ball jar and smelled the contents. “It’s relish, sweet and good.”
The pot on the stove was boiling, and it looked like there were enough ears of corn in there to feed a small village. Sheila had tossed a salad in a big green bowl and put croutons in, which I always called wood chips because that’s what they look like to me. There were fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and just about everything you could think of in the salad, and I thought that staying with Sheila was a pretty good idea because I’d learn a lot about cooking. She’d also made potato and macaroni salad.
She asked me to pour the lemonade, and Mr. Taylor helped me get out the ice and put it in the big glasses. It was almost like having a real family with everybody pitching in and helping.
“So, is June Bug your real name?” Mr. Taylor said as we carried the food to the dining room table.
I shrugged, thinking about the picture I’d seen and wondering what it would feel like for people to call me Natalie. “It’s what I’ve always answered to.”
“Doesn’t seem like a name fitting a pretty girl like you.”
Dad brought a plate of burgers in and there was cheese running down the sides of some of them and juice still bubbling around the edges. “Her real name’s June, but I added the
Bug.
”
“You pick out the name or did your wife?” Mr. Taylor said.
Dad wiped his hands on a napkin and surveyed the table. “Guess it was a mutual decision.” He looked at Sheila. “You didn’t put out the caviar?”
Sheila laughed. “We’re all out.”
“Well, you have everything else. This looks fantastic.”
We sat down and started passing food. There was something missing, and at first I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it came to me. I’d seen it in a lot of movies, especially ones around a big meal like at Thanksgiving or Christmas, which is what this felt like, even though it was summer and the flies were trying to get to the food before we did.
“We should pray,” I said.
Mr. Taylor was cutting the corn off the cob onto his plate, and he stopped midway through the row he was on. Dad raised his eyebrows at me.
Sheila was the only one who nodded and bowed her head. “Why don’t you do the honors?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Sure you can,” she said. “Just thank God for the food and anything else you want to thank him for.”
All of a sudden my face felt hot. I couldn’t tell if Dad was mad at me for bringing up the subject, or maybe he was worried that Mr. Taylor would be offended for some reason.
I scrunched my eyes closed and put my hands together so tight I couldn’t tell which one was right and which one was left. I tried to remember the prayers I’d seen on those movies, but nothing really came to me and Mr. Taylor cleared his throat like he was some starving man in Africa who just wanted to eat.
“Dear God,” I started. My voice didn’t sound like myself—it sounded like some animal being strangled—but I kept on going. “Thank you for this food. Thank you for my new dress and the sandals. Thank you for our new friends. Oh, and the necklace too and my haircut. And help us to have a good time tonight. Amen.”
“That was a very nice prayer,” Sheila said.
“Straight from the heart, June Bug,” my dad said.
Mr. Taylor kept cutting his corn, and I passed the butter to him and the salt for when he was done cutting it.
Walter whined at the back door and Sheila scolded him. Dad got up and took one of the burgers that was a little too done and gave it to him. The dog devoured it in one gulp and came right back to the door and whined louder. Other than that, all you could hear was the clinking of silverware on plates and Mr. Taylor groaning with pleasure over the taste of the meal. He spread his chowchow on the plate and mixed it with his corn, which looked disgusting to me. I wondered if his dead wife would have wanted him to open that jar at somebody else’s table, but I wasn’t about to ask that either.
Dad says you can learn a lot more from listening than you can from talking. I tried to just eat and not say anything until one of the grown-ups did, but the silence was about to kill me.
Finally Mr. Taylor wiped his mouth and sat back—at least as far back as he could with his shoulders being bent forward. “So what are your plans now that you’ve gotten the RV fixed?” he said to my dad.
Dad took a drink of lemonade. “Well, we need to take a trip back east. I have a couple errands I need to run.”
I nearly dropped my burger on my new dress. “What errands?”
“Just a couple of things I need to do. We need some more funds for one. And who knows, I might trade the old junker in for something a little more updated.”
“But I want to stay here,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me we were leaving?”
I slammed my napkin down on the table and ran through the front door. I could hear Dad calling after me and opening the front door and running onto the porch, but I didn’t stop until I got to Mr. Taylor’s fence.
“June Bug, come back here!” Dad yelled as he crossed the basketball court.
I stood there with my hands tight on the fence, wishing I could crawl through and run until my legs gave out. Dad came up behind me and knelt down. He didn’t say anything, so I started.
“Why didn’t you tell me we were leaving?” I said again, trying to hold back the tears. But the thing is, the more you try to hold them back, the worse it gets and then you start to snort and I hate doing that when I’m by myself, let alone in front of somebody.
He put a hand on my shoulder and turned me toward him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. There’re a few things I have to do to get us back in business. I don’t expect you to understand that—”
“I
don’t
understand it. This is the first time we’ve had somebody who cares about us and wants to do stuff for us.” I pulled at my dress. “Like this. Why can’t we just stay here? You could get a job and sell the RV, and Sheila likes having us around. She’d marry you if you’d ask her. And I could work for Mr. Taylor on his farm, and it could be like a regular family. I could go to school and have friends and go to sleepovers and stuff.”
Dad glanced at me with that head down, knowing look. “You’ve been listening to our conversations, haven’t you?”
“I might have heard a thing or two. But she’s right. I don’t want to live in that thing anymore.” I pointed to the RV. “I like sleeping in a real bed and having a dog and being able to ride my bike in the driveway and down the path through the trees. Why can’t we be like normal people? real people?”
“We are real people. It’s just that . . .” His voice trailed off, and he ran a hand through his hair. “I thought you liked being on the road. I thought you liked the freedom and the chance to visit new places and see things. We’ve done a lot together. Been able to see a bunch of places other kids only dream of seeing.”
It’s hard to watch your dad act hurt over stuff, but sometimes you just have to spill out the truth. “Other kids don’t dream of riding a bike in a Walmart parking lot. It’s like being on vacation all the time. You know? You want to be free, but I don’t know what we’re being free from.”
Dad rubbed his chin, staring off at the horse barn. “I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d make this trip by myself. If Sheila’s okay with it and if you want to, you could stay here. I don’t know how that would work with her needing to go off every day to—”
“I could babysit Walter,” I said. “I’d be okay. But where are you going?”
“Back east. Tie up some loose ends, you know. Then maybe I’d be set to settle down. Stop all the driving around and sell that hunk of junk and buy us a place where you could make some friends and go to school.”
My heart was soaring and breaking all at once. It was like listening to somebody give up on a dream, but at the same time, choose something better. You can’t have the apple pie if you choose the cherry or the lemon meringue, but maybe apple is overrated.
“That would be nice,” I said. “And I wouldn’t be any trouble to her. I promise.”
Dad stood, pulled me off the ground, and hugged me tightly.
Hanging there with my arms around his neck, knowing that I was going to sleep in a real bed for a while gave me the tingles all over. Then something felt wrong, like the whole thing was planned, though I knew he couldn’t have planned to get stuck in the Walmart parking lot. “How long will you be gone?”
“As long as it takes,” he said.
I pulled back and looked him in the eyes. “A week? A couple of weeks?”
“Something like that,” he said, like he didn’t want to pin it down. Like the winter we went to the Grand Canyon and he didn’t want to say how long we’d stay there because he wanted to just sit for days on the south rim and watch the sun rise every day. That was back when he didn’t want to sleep at night, and when he did he would wake up yelling and screaming and have to walk outside without a shirt on and kneel down and sometimes throw up.
“You’re not leaving me, are you?” I said.
Dad put me on the ground. Then he leaned down and got in my face. “June Bug, how could I ever leave you? You’ve been in my heart since the first time I saw you.”
He sounded so warm and tender and fuzzy, like a stuffed puppy. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Are you my real daddy?”
He looked startled at first. “Why do you ask that?”
I shrugged. “’Cause I want to know.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
It was all I could do not to blurt out that I had seen myself on the board at Walmart. “Lots of reasons. I don’t look like you. There’s no pictures of you holding me as a baby. Stuff like that.”
Dad smiled like Bruce Willis did in one of those movies we watched, kind of to the side and his eyes scrunched up. “Let’s go back before the food gets cold. And tell Sheila the good news.”
He took my hand, and we walked through the old pine needles and pinecones that lay rotting on the ground. It was right then, when he wouldn’t answer my questions, that I knew something terrible was going to happen. Or maybe something terrible had already happened. Maybe that was why we were out on the road 24-7.