Page 64 of To the Moon and Back

KAYLA THE WESTERN HISTORY COLLECTIONS

Felicia and I hadn’t planned on Oklahoma. But here we were, three weeks into living with my mom, with no idea when (or if) we’d leave.

Jason and I would share custody. The first thing I’d told him was not to worry about that.

I said to think of me in Oklahoma as a vacation from our divorce proceedings, a period without pressure to figure things out.

He agreed. The divorce exhausted him, his work life and home life creeping into each other.

I took Felicia out for ice cream on a Sunday afternoon.

Mom had said to go along without her, which was new and weird.

Part of her recent habit of leaving me alone.

Not physically—she was always in the same room as me, following quietly behind like a cat.

She asked for nothing. She read library books and wrote in a small journal.

She drank coffee very slowly. She took two short naps a day, one of them in a hammock so she could watch the birds in the bird feeder.

She cooked three meals a day on her own, until I decided to help.

She didn’t ask me hard questions about my life or tell me what was wrong with it.

Every morning and every night she told me and Felicia she loved us.

When I was a kid and Brett left, and then Steph, too much was put on me.

Not just dishes and laundry and meals, but waking Mom up for work, and setting her clothes out, and making sure the bills got paid even if she was sad.

I wasn’t sure if Mom knew what that had been like for me.

It’s no wonder I ran away to Hollis, no wonder I started the kind of family that owned a label maker and knew where it was.

Only now, fallen apart at thirty-three years old, was I being more parented than ever in my life.

Felicia and I sat on the curb outside Braum’s, far from everyone else. She wore a bright yellow sweatshirt and large beaded earrings, in the shape of neon rainbows falling from puffy white clouds. She’d put her grandmother’s gel in her hair and it stood straight up, like she was being electrocuted.

Felicia said her grandmother was “kinda different this trip.”

“Hmm,” I said. “You think so?”

“Yeah. And don’t tell me she’s just older now.” Felicia took two big bites, and got chocolate on her nose. I wanted to lick my thumb and wipe it off, but didn’t. She was about to turn fourteen.

She was also right. Mom seemed extremely different, in just the year since she’d been laid off.

She worked part-time now, behind the counter at a fancy new bakery.

It was the first job to ever let her sit down, but it didn’t pay well.

Before Hawai’i I’d set up monthly auto-transfers from me and Steph. Maybe that had helped?

Maybe she was changed, maybe I was, maybe this was all just the shape of our lives switching around in those weeks.

The mess of it! The divorce, the protest, the police.

Me and Felicia at the airport, unshowered, deciding together where to go.

The obituary too-bright white on the smudged screen of my phone.

The unanswered texts to my asshole of a sister, who I then saw online had fucked off to the bottom of the sea.

Felicia looked up from her half-eaten cone. “Why did Elisi live with intimate partner violence?”

“Sorry, what?”

“It’s an updated term for domestic violence.”

I almost laughed. The older she got, the less she thought I knew. “Huh. Well. Did she tell you she lived with intimate partner violence?”

Felicia nodded. “When she couldn’t come for ice cream! I just asked where she was going.”

“What did she say?”

“A monthly support group for women survivors of intimate partner violence.” She recited it carefully, with a lilt. I still wanted to wipe her face clean.

“Huh.”

“It’s not a secret or anything. I just was like, ‘Hey Elisi, where are you going?’ And she was like, ‘A monthly support group for women survivors of intimate partner violence!’ She would’ve told you, if you ever asked her stuff.”

I crumpled a napkin in my hand. She could wipe her own nose.

“So?” she said. “Why did Elisi do that? When she could have, like, left?”

I scraped the edges of my paper bowl. “She did leave.”

Felicia looked at me like I was a child.

“Okay, okay! I’m not sure what to say. Can I think for a minute?”

Felicia nodded. She chomped on her waffle cone and swallowed. She tried to lick the chocolate off the bottom of her nose and failed.

My spoon still scraped the bowl, which was empty.

I gave up and set it on the curb. “Honey, I don’t think anyone can know that but your grandmother.

And I really don’t think she likes to talk about it.

I know that when she got pregnant, her parents kicked her out.

Her and my dad, the one I was too young to remember, moved to Dallas together.

And when women get in that kind of relationship, they can end up more and more isolated. ”

“When people get in that kind of relationship,” Felicia said.

“Sorry. You’re right.”

“But why’d they kick her out? Just ’cause of the baby?”

“I think so,” I said. “It never came up.”

“Did you ask her?”

I tried again. “I think things were hard for your elisi’s mother, too. Remember, she’s the one whose parents left her in a—”

I stopped myself. I didn’t really know.

If I were right, if my mom’s mom had lived some super sad life, then what? Could I point to something bad enough and say that was why ? Was that a thing to teach my daughter?

That night, I lay in the bottom bunk and let myself be pissed at Steph for not being here.

It was all very blast from the past. Here I was again, left in charge of the family!

The only one around to answer questions about Mom.

Someday, knowing Steph would be useless, it would fall on me to be the one to bother with our ancestors.

I could almost picture them, hundreds of long-dead people; how they’d jump on my back and demand to be carried.

But then again, did I even want Steph’s help? Maybe I preferred her in the fucking ocean. Maybe I’d prefer her in fucking outer space.

I opened Instagram. On NASA’s feed, Steph and another woman wore wet suits and scuba gear.

They stood way too close, Steph’s arm around the woman’s waist, and I wondered if they were having sex.

She was Steph’s type, wasn’t she? Sciencey, driven girls whose careers she could ruin.

They both waved at the camera from a part of their submarine that had a showerhead on the wall and a square pool of calm shiny water at the bottom—which meant the pool was inside , even though the submarine was underwater, which made no sense to me.

I got out of bed. I googled the physics of the pool thing on the toilet awhile, giving up when it made me feel dumb.

Standing at the sink I scrolled through Instagram again, looking at the friends I’d lost and the friends I might never see again.

I commented a heart under a photo of Diana at some kind of faculty cocktail party at Exeter, that Exeter, home of the one time in Steph’s life she couldn’t bend the world to her will.

Diana was dressed up preppy like I’d never seen her, and so surrounded by friends that pieces of them were sliced out of the frame.

Her purple glasses were gone, her hair was straightened and curled, and she held a tiny, quilted leather purse in one hand.

Sometimes at camp, mid-gossip session, Diana and I would sit next to each other on two plastic, five-gallon buckets and shit into them.

Now in my mother’s bathroom, where she kept Steph’s badly woven basket still filled with dusty potpourri, I massaged tea tree oil onto my scalp and breathed deeply and deleted the app from my phone.

On Monday, I enrolled Felicia at my old high school. I was in and out of the main office fast, mostly to avoid running into Brett. It would suck if he’d heard from the internet why I was in town, and it would suck if he hadn’t and asked me to tell him.

“Starting her in school here is just for now,” I’d told Jason on the phone.

“We can figure out a real plan later.” He suggested we have our first Values and Goals call at the end of the month.

Values and Goals sounded more hopeful than custody negotiation, and for years I’d heard him call it that with clients over the phone.

Then he’d press a timer button on an app, which divided his life into six-minute billable increments.

Our new lives fell into a temporary rhythm. In the mornings Mom and I would sit on the front stoop. Both of us were early-risers, drinking coffee in silence while Felicia slept in the house. Eventually, I was ready.

I asked Mom about everything that came before me, after me, and without me. She talked fast, excited, her mug unsteady in her hand. Suddenly, she seemed to have a lot to say. She had wanted to be a writer when she was younger, or a librarian. Maybe a social worker.

“I cared a lot about him,” she said. She told me my dad had no one in the world but her, that he had so much pain in him and so much need.

He would come home from work sometimes and lay his head in her lap and cry.

She said she still remembered the feel of his hair in her fingers, how she’d hold his head in her hands and wait with him until it passed.

“He felt things real, real deeply,” she said.

“Not that I could have changed that,” she added, “or that it excuses certain things he did.”

One morning, I told her he had died. I said he’d been alive before, somehow, years after the car crash she’d told me had killed him. I said I’d found his obituary, and it was recent. It cited a car swerving off a road, not recent at all. “Why’d you tell me he died in a car crash?”

Mom squinted across the front yard, like she was waiting for the mail. “I never said car crash .”

“What?”

She finished her coffee and put the mug down carefully at her feet.