The Queen of Sleepy Eye

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four The Present

Forty-Five

Acknowledgments

after word

The Queen of Sleepy Eye

Questions for Discussion

The Author's Guide to Enhancing Your Book Club Experience

An Interview with Patti Hill

About the Author

To the dads who have loved me
through every season—
Abba Father
Bill Kegebein
John Kretlow
Jack Hill

It is very unfair to judge of anybody's conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation. Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
Jane Austen,
Emma

A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.
Thomas Merton

To be alive is to be broken. And to be broken is to stand in need of grace.
Brennan Manning,
The Ragamuffin Gospel

I was no bigger than a bug in my mother's womb when the two of us drove away from Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, toward our lives as a duet.

Mom had no destination in mind. The Kaskaskia River wound through the trees like a silver ribbon. The scene reminded her of a photograph that had hung over her parents' bed, so she parked the Pontiac and slept for the first time in three days. Months later I was born at St. Margaret's Hospital within a stone's throw of that parking space. The sisters cooed over my young, recently-widowed mother, a Madonna-like vision with her newborn daughter. Mom named me in the Portuguese tradition with two surnames, my father's name listed before my mother's. That was how I came to be María Amelia Casimiro Monteiro. Amy, for short. This was the goodnight story Mom loved to tell.

At my first awareness, sometime around the age of four, I remember hearing the fairy-tale beginning of my life, born to the Queen of Sleepy Eye as I was. Unjustly dethroned after only
twenty-three days as the 1958 Queen of Sleepy Eye, Mom refused to return the tiara and the sash. Her larceny seemed justified since her only crime had been a secret marriage to my father. Whenever one of Mom's girlfriends visited the house, Mom brought out the velvet box. With her fingers poised to lift the lid, her eyes lucent, and her smile shamelessly demure, she paused until her audience gushed, “Oh, Francie, for goodness' sake, open the box.”

By age ten, I yawned and stretched as she ceremoniously set the box on the coffee table. By the time I turned thirteen, half the rhinestones had fallen from the tiara's settings. Never mind that I'd buried the ratty thing under coffee grounds and potato skins in the kitchen trash more than once, only to retrieve the tiara before my mother discovered it missing. The story was a droning fly I batted away, but it always came back. My apathy went unnoticed. Mom told her story to anyone willing to listen. She worked conversations like a fisherman angling a fighting bass—reel, slack, feed the line—until she hooked the opportunity to tell of her stolen royalty. Grocery lines. Intimate apparel sales. Parent-teacher conferences. The world was ripe for a hard-luck queen story.

Today, Mom rarely speaks of her summer in Sleepy Eye. That was fifty years ago. As far as I know, the tiara and sash lie buried in a landfill with petrified hot dogs and Twinkies. She and my stepfather have retired to travel.

Three years ago, Mom called from New Zealand, and the line between today and yesterday grew decidedly fuzzy. “Amy, honey,” Mom yelled as she did when she called from more than ten miles away. “You have to help me find the Pontiac.”

I'd spent my early years loathing that car. Mom demanded it be kept in showroom-floor condition. That meant weekly washings, vacuuming, and massaging a special cleaner on the dashboard to
keep it from cracking, as if Mom ever parked the car in the sun. Scuffed door panels were scrubbed immediately. The ashtray went unused. If I wore shoes with buckles, off they came before I was allowed to sit on the seat.

Once a month, Mom polished the leather seats while I waxed the car from stem to stern. For that car I missed birthday parties, grand openings of the A&P and the Dairy Queen, and the very first showing of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
at the Egyptian Theater. Honestly, a little brother would have been a more tolerable evil, especially since Mom only drove the car when the mood struck her. All of this for the 1958 Pontiac Bonneville Sport Coupe Jubilee Edition, a car that without equivocation, outranked every other car in pure gaudiness. Chrome accentuated every line and arched like drowsy eyelids over twin headlights and taillights. The grill was a chrome waffle. But most unsettling of all was the green-on-green paint that soured my stomach.

Still, the Pontiac was the only artifact of my father I'd known.

“The Pontiac?” I asked her. “You sold that—what, thirty years ago? What's this about?”

“This phone call is costing me a fortune.” Mom blew her nose. “
Fofa,
honey, I'm desperate. You're so good at finding things. How hard could it be to find a few thousand pounds of metal with four wheels?” The line went quiet for a long time—on my end, because I was wondering why the Pontiac had reemerged as an object of Mom's devotion. From countless other conversations, I'd learned silence on her end meant she was sifting her memories for leverage. Her effort proved unnecessary. Graham, our youngest, had thrown up grape juice on Mom's white sofa last Thanksgiving. I owed her.

“Do you even remember the name of the man who bought the car?”

“You're such a good daughter, my honey,
meu fofa.
”

While Mom and Chuck took culinary tours of Tuscany and visited the Northern Baltic countries, the search consumed me for three years. I followed hunches and faded memories to heaps of rusted car bodies in tired cities and townships. That's how Mom and I have come to be in Barstow, California, standing in the dust and scanning the ground for rattlesnakes.

* * *

“THIS HAS TO be the car, Mom. Look at it.”

“I just want to be sure that this is
our
car.” Mom reads the vehicle identification number from the car's firewall while I scan the numbers written in the family Bible, something I'd already done over the phone with the car's restorer. Mom sighs and a flush of relief washes over me—and something else unexpected and harder to name. Foreboding? Suspicion? Nausea? I look to Mom to confirm or dismiss my tumbling gut, but she is digging in her purse for her checkbook.

The restorer of the Pontiac waves a hornet away from his sandwich with a greasy rag, but a half dozen more marauders hover around the man's head. From the slump of the man's shoulders, I don't presume him to be ambitious, but his asking price could retire the national debt.

“Ladies, you have to understand, this car is in primo condition. The original owner ordered all the available technology of that time. The sliding Plexiglas sun visor. The Wonderbar AM radio with an automatic power antenna. Power windows. Memo-Matic power memory seats. And they don't make reproduction parts for this baby. Oh no, I hunted down
new
old parts from vendors all over the country. Make that the world. I got an authentic GM resonator from a parts guy in Ireland.”

“We're going to the Bay area. Will the car get us there?” I ask.

“This car is better than the day she came off the assembly line. The twos of you could drive her to China and back,” he says, backhanding mustard off his chin.

“I better take the car for a test drive, just to be sure,” Mom says.

The man eyes me up and down. “You leavin' your daughter as collateral?”

“I'll be accompanying Mom.” I open my wallet to the man. “Take a credit card. Take two or three.” My feet itch to get off the snake-infested ground, also a true haven for scorpions and tarantulas and speed-of-light lizards. I hate the desert.

The man fingers the American Express Card, stops, pulls out the MasterCard. “I forget. I don't take American Express.”

Mom starts the car, and the rumble of the engine thrums against a raw place in my heart. I blink away the tears.

“Let's go,” she says and slides the transmission into drive. Her chin trembles. We turn onto a road that curves through a subdivision of tightly packed stucco houses with postage-stamp lawns. The green is startling through the shimmer of heat off the pavement.

I ask, “Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

“Is it the money?”

“Memories, mostly.”

She slows for a dip, and the Pontiac rolls like a boat riding a swell. The car is heavy, substantial, nothing like the Prius—a bantamweight by comparison—I drive between our home in Carpenteria and Westmont College in Santa Barbara.

“You were conceived in this car,” she says.

I glance toward the backseat and shiver. “So, how's she handling? I remember the steering being a little loose.”

“Amy, honey, we have to talk.” Her hand covers her mouth to staunch a flow of emotion. I watch her, not breathing. Her chest rises and falls. “I know you're expecting a weekend of pampering at Bodega Hot Springs. That's what I promised, and more than anyone I know, you deserve to be treated like a queen. You persevered, Amy. You found the car. But, Amy,
fofa
, we aren't going to the spa.” She kneads the steering wheel. “That was a lie.”

“Mom? What? You're scaring me. You're not sick, are you?”

Her eyes glisten with tears. “The time has come to set some things right from my past.” She glances at me before fixing her gaze out the windshield. “I'm not proud of this, but I stole this car from your father years ago. He left me no choice. I've lived in a state of terror all of these years. Every time the phone rang, I feared the police had found me. A knock on the door? Who else? A detective and his partner. You know, like
Dragnet
? I lived in dread of opening the newspaper to find a picture of the Pontiac and me with a caption, ‘Have you seen this car or the car thief named María Francisca Montiero Santos?'”

No one is more melodramatic than Mom.

“You're not making sense. You were married. As his widow, the car became yours.”

“The truth is … we were never actually married.”

“Never?”

Her knuckles pale as she grips the steering wheel. “And he isn't exactly dead either. He's retired and living in Sleepy Eye.”

My high school American history teacher, Mrs. Lund, had once told a story about a World War II paratrooper who had been hidden away in occupied Holland by a seemingly benevolent Dutchman. The paratrooper lived behind painted windows, knowing only what his host chose to reveal. Maybe it had been an episode of
The Twilight
Zone
, the one with a very young Robert Redford.

All the paratrooper knew to be true about the world had been the fabrication of his host. Finally released, the paratrooper walked a narrow, cobbled street filled with housewives carrying bundles and merchants arranging produce. Children chased each other, laughing and taunting. This wasn't the war-savaged scene his benefactor had described. Bewildered, the paratrooper stumbled along trying to reconstruct his reality.

I know how he felt.

“You should pull over,” I say.

She continues driving down the middle of the street. “Maybe I should have told you sooner.”

Now I'm angry, which makes me cry. “
Maybe?
I thought my father was dead. I cried for him. I prayed for him. When other little girls asked for ponies, I pleaded with Santa Claus to bring my daddy back. And you think
maybe
you should have told me?” Tears flow down Mom's cheek too. Wounding her deflates my anger. “Please park the car.”

The front wheel jumps the curb, and the car lurches to a stop. Mom lets the car idle in front of a fire hydrant as she flexes her hands on the steering wheel. “I wanted to tell you, and I will tell you everything, but I'm sure that greasy man—”

“I think his name is Bob.”

“Bob
schmob
.” Mom sighs.

My penchant for detail drives her crazy. Too bad. “Mom, please …”

“Okay, okay. Chuck and I were snorkeling in this amazing place—”

“I know this part. Tell me about my father and why you're buying this car.”

“I was getting to that.”

From the crease between her eyes, I know I will hear the story she wants to tell, not necessarily the one I want to hear. Hasn't it always been this way?

“Anyway, we were snorkeling in this amazing spot on the Coromandel Peninsula on New Zealand's north island called Gemstone Bay. Oh, Amy, the kelp swayed with the surge of the water. I startled a manta ray, followed a red moki as he swam through the amber forest. A whole new world—”

“Stop! Tell me about my father.”

“
Querida
, please don't cry.” She reaches for me, and I lean into her shoulder.

Good heavens, I'm fifty years old!
I sit up. “Mom, tell your story.”

She hands me a wad of tissues from her purse. “There I was, thousands of miles from home. I hadn't thought about the Pontiac since … I just haven't thought of the car in a long time. And there I was, immersed in amazing beauty, and God spoke to me. He said, ‘It's time to right a wrong, Francisca. Take the car back to Carl.'”

“Carl? Who's Carl?”

“Carl Swenson is your father.” Mom shifts into drive and heads back the way we came. “We have a long journey before us. We'll have lots of time to talk.”

“Then who's Fabio Casimiro?”

She winced and expelled a long breath. “I was scared. The sisters asked for the father's name. You don't know what being pregnant and unmarried was like back then. A widow was respected, treated with great tenderness. A single mother was a slut, a whore. I'd made up a name for your father. I used the name to curse him every time my heart dared to long for him. The name isn't so nice.”

“But nice enough to give to your daughter?”

“I had no choice.” Mom pats my knee. “It's not that bad.
Fabio
means bean and
Casimiro
means great destroyer. Carl, he … he …”

“He what?”

She shrugs. “Carl farted a lot. I swear he could fart on command. Once he asked me to pull his finger, and when I laughed, he asked me to go for a drive.”

All I knew about my father was what Mom had told me, that he was handsome, sweet, and very, very smart. She convinced me he couldn't wait to be a papa. My throat tightens around this new truth. My real father wooed Mom, age sixteen, with a coarse joke. The muscle that connects my left eyebrow to the back of my head cramps. Although doing so won't stop the migraine, I knead my aching eyebrow anyway. “I was really looking forward to Bodega Hot Springs.”

“Maybe next year for your birthday,
querida
.”

“This long trip you're talking about. Tell me we're not going to Sleepy Eye.”