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He was handsome enough and, if he maybe ate some more solid meals and took care of the scruff on his face, he might have been a really good-looking guy. The kind of man my gorgeous mother would have fallen for once upon a time.
“Hey, there, Sylvie,” were the first words he’d ever said to me. “Why don’t we get on out of here?” he asked.
So that was what we did.
We gathered the few bags of my belongings that the Child Services lady had brought over, and we made our way outside.
I hadn’t noticed at the time, but my father and his mother hadn’t shared a single word. Hardly even a glance.
“Bet you’ve never been in one of these before, huh?” he asked as he led me out to the street where a truck was parked. You know, one of the big eighteen-wheelers like you saw on the highway. Except this one didn’t have that long box on the back. It was just the front part, really.
Only it wasn’t just the front seat of a truck.
There was actually a tiny apartment in the back with a bed, a microwave, a mini fridge, and some storage compartments.
It wasn’t big, but I remember being surprised how big it seemed inside compared to the outside.
“We’re gonna have to figure it out,” he said, misunderstanding my gaze as I looked around. Like I was looking for where I would sleep and eat too.
“You live here?” was what I remember asking him, but I didn’t know if it was the first thing I said to him or not.
“Yep. And now, I guess, you do too.”
“But where’s your house?”
“This is it,” he told me, waving toward the back room. “Just this and the open road.”
I didn’t understand at the time.
I wouldn’t for a couple of days since he brought me to a motel at first while he ‘figured some shit out.’
I had no idea what he figured out, but I suppose it was things with Child Services.
Then we left town.
“What about your mom’s funeral?” Voss asked, pulling me out of my memories for a moment.
“I never went to it. Didn’t even know it was going on,” I admitted. “I actually never found her grave until I moved back to Navesink Bank in my early twenties.”
I still went there.
Not as often as I had when I’d turned up in this town, beaten down, almost broken.
But I went.
On Mother’s day, her birthday, holidays when I felt particularly alone.
Someone, though I had no clue who, had given her a lovely gravestone. It had her name, her birth and death, then two simple, very true, words.
Loving mother.
“So, your old man was a long-haul trucker?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t understand it at first. How his home and his work and his entire life could exist in such a small space.
But it did.
I spent that first day on the road after the motel stay listening to the men talk on his radio. He seemed unbothered by the idea of a nine-year-old girl listening to the very adult male conversations going on over that radio.
In his defense, though, pretty much all of it had gone over my head.
“You take the bed tonight,” he said later, when it was dark and we were parked at a truck stop, after having a fast food dinner.
I didn’t feel I could ask any more questions than that, so I just climbed in and fell asleep.
The next week or so was much of the same. Driving, listening to the radio, eating fast food, and sleep. Except I got to experience my first rest stop shower too.
It was just a big room that you rented where you were expected to strip down and shower, and hope the lock on the door held.
I’d never had much experience with fear before. My mom had shielded me so well. But I’d been terrified in those showers.
Older me would later understand why.
It was just my gut instincts kicking in before I was old enough to understand them.
“You’re a quiet thing, huh?” my father asked one day after turning off the radio because some guy was talking very animatedly about something called a ‘lot lizard,’ saying a bunch of words it would take me another couple of years to understand. And to relate to my own body. Which had been an uncomfortable discovery, to say the least.
The thing was, I had never been a quiet kid. With my mom, I had babbled endlessly, was one of those kids who must have made their moms absolutely insane because of their utter inability to keep their traps shut.
She’d always loved it, though. Had encouraged my curiosity and asked follow-up questions to keep me going.
My father didn’t seem to know how to speak to me.
“Where do I go to school?” I remember asking.
“Well, see, that’s a good question,” he said, nodding. “I don’t know. Not yet. You get to be off for a while. You know, on account of your mom. God rest her. But then it is summer break. I figure that gives me a couple months to figure things out.”
