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“Mom.”
“I know.” She gives me a small smile. “Very glamorous.”
I reach across the table and put my hand over hers.
She turns her palm beneath mine and holds on.
“I wasn’t good for a while, Bea. I got you settled with Grandma because you needed school and dinners at the same time every night and someone who remembered to buy toothpaste. I could barely remember what day it was.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“You were sixteen. You’d lost your dad. It wasn’t your job to look after me too.”
Her thumb strokes over my knuckles.
“I spent months thinking grief was something I had to finish. Like there would be a morning when I woke up, and everything would be done, and I could go back to being whoever I’d been before. But that woman didn’t exist anymore. Your father had been part of every plan I’d made since I was twenty-three.”
She looks towards the diner window.
“One morning, I opened the hall cabinet and found his old road atlas.” She laughs. He always insisted on us having a physical map even when we’d use GPS to actually get around when I was a kid. “You remember that horrible thing?”
“The one held together with tape?”
“That’s the one. It had coffee stains all over it and circles around places he’d wanted us to go. Some we’d been to. Most we hadn’t.”
Her eyes shine again, but she is smiling now.
“Then I saw an ad for a second-hand campervan, a little VW California, and I thought it was fate.”
“You bought it that day?”
“I went to look at it that day. I bought it three days later, after Grandma made me get it checked by an actual mechanic instead of ‘trusting the energy of the vehicle.’”
I laugh through the sting behind my eyes.
“Thank God for Gran.”
“She’s saved me from myself more times than I can count.”
“So the van was because of Dad?”
“Partly. But it just felt right.”
She finally takes a bite of pancake.
“At first, I stayed close. I’d drive for a few days, then come back to see you. I slept in campsites twenty minutes from Gran’s house more often than you knew. Then, once you were older and I knew you were okay, I started going farther.”
“And you weren’t lonely?”
“Sometimes. But I’d be much more lonely in a big house.”
“Your dad and I made friends everywhere,” she continues. “Nashville. Austin. California. Towns you probably don’t even remember. I used to think leaving meant losing them, but it didn’t. Now when I travel, there’s almost always someone nearby. Linda in New Mexico. Josie outside Denver. The Carters in Tennessee. Last Christmas, I parked outside a woman’s house I hadn’t seen in eleven years, and she opened the door like I’d only been gone for the weekend.”
The corner of her mouth lifts.
“Last week, I watched the sun come up over the Smokies from my front door. My front door just happened to be parked at a campsite in Tennessee. Tomorrow it might be somewhere else.”
She squeezes my hand.
