17
Jessa woke up after tossing and turning most of the night. She barely slept. This place felt cold, but not because of the weather. Because it didn’t feel like home.
Home.
Something she never thought she’d feel. But she knew where her heart was, and it wasn’t here in Arkansas.
Megan slept on the second queen-sized bed in the room. It was still dark outside, so Jessa picked up her phone and looked at the time. It was only four in the morning. They didn’t need to be at work until eight.
She slid out of the bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, quietly closing the door behind her. Then she sat on the edge of the bathtub and dialed her mom’s phone number. It was outside of their scheduled call time, so she didn’t expect her to answer. But to her surprise, her mom picked up.
“Jessa? Are you okay?” Her mom’s voice flooding through the line had Jessa’s eyes welling up.
“Hi, Mom. Yes, I’m okay. I just was hoping to talk to you.”
“Hang on one second.”
Jessa could hear her mom calling over to her dad and then suddenly her dad’s voice came over the line.
“Hi, honey. How are you?”
“I’m good, Dad. How are you?”
“Better now that I’m hearing from my little girl.”
Jessa smiled through her welling eyes. She let out a shaky breath.
“What’s wrong, honey?” her mom asked.
She was on speakerphone, that much she knew. So both her parents could hear her. Jessa swallowed thickly.
“I think I met someone I really like.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“Is it?” Jessa asked. “He doesn’t want to leave his hometown.”
“And you don’t like it?” her dad asked.
“I do. I actually love it. But you know how it is.”
“I don’t think we know what you mean.”
Jessa laughed lightly. “Because we move. It’s what we do. We don’t stay in one spot.”
Her parents grew silent, only the sound of the crashing waves in the background coming over the phone.
Jessa furrowed her eyebrows. It wasn’t like her parents to get quiet. They usually had a reply for everything. “Um… I know I didn’t lose you. So what’s going on?”
“Do you believe you can’t settle down in a town because we are always on the go?” her mom asked.
“Well… yeah. It’s kind of how I was raised. I get restless in one spot. You do too.”
“We don’t. We actually enjoy a lot of places and have considered settling down.”
Jessa furrowed her brow. “So why were we always moving?”
As if she could picture her mom shrugging, she said, “For work. It’s hard to do the job we do if we don’t travel. And wealways thought you’d enjoy a life of seeing the world. We both came from poor families who could never travel, so when we were offered the opportunity to do a photography job for a large nature magazine, we took it. Then it just kind of snowballed from there, and we got addicted to the high of traveling. We were afraid to turn anything down and risk the opportunity disappearing, so we just kept on doing it.” Her mom sighed. “I wish I knew you didn’t enjoy it. We would have stopped.”
