And then, at the end of the road, there’s the motorhome. It’s not a clubhouse. It’s a closet. A tomb. It’s where he left me so he could forget I existed, the way Margo sends her fake Christmas tree to storage after New Year’s.
The white metal sides have rusty stains at every bolt, and one of the windows is broken. I feel like I should go in and search for some kind of understanding. Or maybe to clean everything, because whatever mess is in there shouldn’t be all that’s left of someone. But I can’t make my feet take me to the door. I don’t want to see what he left behind. I don’t want to remember what it felt like to live there. The whole motorhome leans like it might tip over, and I’m not exactly light on my feet.
The thing of it is, the motorhome doesn’t look much worse than it did when I lived in it. It hasn’t changed enough. I feel like if I look hard, I could still find splinters from my guitar in the dirt. I can almost feel the sting of my father’s hand on my cheek.
I walk out to the flooded house foundation. It’s so overgrown that I have to step around roots and bushwhack my way through. Something thorny scratches me and leaves a thin line of blood across the back of my hand. I sit on the edge of the foundation and rest my feet on the first step of what would have been the stairs to our basement. The water comes up to the step below, a film of leaves across the surface. It smells like rot.
It’s November again. Everything is dead or sleeping. I feel like it’s always November here. There’s never enough warmth or light or any of the things a person really needs. I poke at the leaves with a stick and think about who my parents weren’t until the cold seeps in through my skirt and I start to worry it might not be good for Max. My jacket won’t close over my belly anymore. I wonder if he can get cold in there.
— Chapter 65 —
I get to the church early. It’s this stone building with stained-glass windows and steps that look like they were designed just for wedding pictures. It’s probably the fanciest building in Little River. I’ve never been inside the chapel, just the basement for rummage sales. It’s weird to think about my dad walking through that arched doorway with Irene on Sundays. He didn’t even believe in God until she made him. And it’s not the kind of church that’s like, Jesus was nice so you should be too and feeds homeless people and all that stuff. It’s more like Here’s a bunch of ways you can judge people and feel better about yourself for it—the kind of church that would tell Ethan he was going to hell.
I sit in my car. I’m waiting to sneak in right before the service starts, so I can sit at the back without having to deal with all the people walking past me. But while I’m sitting there watching everyone go in, I start getting mad. The whole town shows up: Mrs. Hunter, Ida Winton, Molly Walker, Gary and his whore of a girlfriend, the Spencers. None of these people even liked my father. And all of them knew about me. They knew where I lived. They knew that he left me. They left me too. Instead of thinking that maybe a kid who lives in a motorhome in the woods might want to come over for cookies and milk after school, they told their kids not to play with me. They looked at me like I should be ashamed for existing, because my parents were divorced and my shoes were ratty and my hair was stringy and I always had dirt under my fingernails. I was something they could catch if they got too close, like my shame would rub off on them. They were happy to forget me, same as my dad. And now they’re all here in their Sunday best like they’re going to get God points for showing up to mourn a man who wasn’t even worth it.
I don’t go in.
The crowd from the parking lot slows to a trickle. Someone closes the doors and there’s nothing to see. I watch anyway. Like maybe my dad will sneak out the back. Like maybe it was all a big sick joke.
Twenty minutes later, I’m still sitting in my car. The silence is making me crazy, but I don’t want to play the radio and drain the battery. I’ve already turned the car on twice to heat it up. I pull out my map, study the roads that look like worms tangled across the states and think about where I want to go next.
There’s a knock on the passenger window.
“What are you doing in my car?”
It’s Mrs. Ivory. She’s got a kid with her. A little girl with pigtails in a pink dress is twirling around on the sidewalk, watching her skirt spin out. One of Mrs. Ivory’s grandchildren. She has about fifty of them.
The passenger window doesn’t like to roll back up once I’ve rolled it down, so I haul myself out of the car and walk around to the sidewalk to talk to her.