“What type of help do we need exactly?”
Her mother blew air out of her nose; glancing to the right, she honked at a car and sped around it. “We need everything, Summer! A place to live. I need a job, support, God...not in that order.” Her mother’s braid hung between her shoulder blades, thick and shiny, as she leaned forward to change the radio station. She bypassed a couple songs Summer liked, only to stop on a station that was playing the blues. Summer rolled her eyes, falling back against the seat. The change in music seemed to make her mother happy; she rolled the window down all the way and sang out at the desert. Her nails were painted a deep red, chipped at the tips. Normally, she never let her nails look like that, but things had been weird lately. Her mother was always tired, always working, always crying. Not in that order.
“Who is your friend?”
This time her mother met her eyes in the rearview mirror. She turned down the radio and pulled a piece of hair out of her mouth before answering.
“We were friends when we were kids. I haven’t seen him in a long time, but we kept in touch. Kind of, anyway...and when your dad died, he reached out to see if there was anything he could do.”
“Like what? Bring him back from the dead?”
There were a couple minutes of prickly silence as her mother stared her down in the rearview mirror. Summer, who was sitting in the back seat as protest for this whole ridiculous trip, looked out the window.
“Hey! Promise me you aren’t going to run your mouth like that when we get there. The last thing I need is—”
“I’m not trying, Mama!” And it was true: the first thing that came to her mind always seemed to shoot out of her mouth like shrapnel.
“You sound like your father.” Her mother’s voice was wounded, but Summer felt stung, too. You sound like your father were mean words from Lorraine, who’d spent the whole of Summer’s life complaining about the man. She didn’t want to talk about her dad, anyway. When she thought about him her chest hurt with how empty it was. The word dead, which had held little meaning to her before, could now trigger a frenzy of bad electricity in her chest.
She knew enough about how people worked to formulate her next question. “What does he need from us?”
“Nothing.” Her mother rested an arm across the bench seat, steering with her left hand. There had been nothing but flat red dirt for hours. “Some people just care, they want to help.”
Where were these people when her dad needed help? But she didn’t say that—couldn’t say it—or she’d get in trouble.
Lorraine caught her daughter’s eye via the rearview mirror again, two brown orbs of intensity.
“There will be plenty of kids your age. And we’re all going to live together, contribute together and be a community.”
“Dad hated socialism.”
“It’s like this experiment, really,” she explained, obviously pretending she hadn’t heard Summer. “Taured was this...this...gangly teenager with adult ideas. It was hard to take him seriously until he started speaking, then everyone would shut up and listen. Anyway, he had this idea when we were just kids and it’s neat being able to be a part of helping him build it.”
“If you’ve been friends with him for so long, why have I never heard of him?”
Lorraine tensed, her arm sliding off the back of the seat where it had been resting.
“Your father didn’t like me having friends, least of all male ones.”
Her mother had never said anything like that to her before. Summer straightened in the back seat, her body tightening with this secret.
“Why not?”
“He was jealous.”
She pictured her dad’s big smile and bigger sideburns and something flipped uncomfortably in her chest. In her memory, his face took on a strange look—the light in his eyes snuffed out and burned like coals. Now that it had been said out loud, she could see it: her dad’s crazy moods. He had yelled at her mom a lot. She always put her Walkman on when they were fighting, but sometimes she heard snippets of what he was yelling. When she looked up, her mom was studying her in the rearview mirror.
“He was different with you than he was with me,” she said simply.
They hadn’t known a lot of people in California, just her dad’s family, and they were kind of strange, but it was still the only place she’d ever lived. Her mama had left her family behind when she’d met Summer’s dad and gotten pregnant. As much as Summer scanned her memory, she couldn’t recall a time her mom had friends over or went out to lunch with someone. Anger bounced up into her chest and she didn’t know what to do with it: anger at her dad, anger at her mom—she was even mad at herself.
“You hate talking about Dad.” Her voice was hurt, accusatory. Again, it had just sprung into her head and she’d said it.
“I don’t,” her mother said, and then she sighed deeply. “Look, Dad owed a lot of people money. That’s why we had to leave. Awful people...no, scary people,” she corrected herself. “We couldn’t stay there.”
“Why couldn’t you keep babysitting and pay them back?” Summer asked.
“Hon...” Her mother’s voice was strained. “I could babysit for the rest of my life and still not be able to pay those guys.”
“Okay.” It was the best peace offering she could make.
“It’s you and me now, kiddo.”
“And, like, all the people we’re going to live with.”
Her mother’s laugh filled up the whole car and Summer felt happy again. Sometimes the things she said made her mother upset, and other times she’d laugh harder than Summer had ever heard. She tried not to say the wrong things, but it was hard to know what exactly it was that made adults upset—they were like seesaws.
An hour later, a row of small, stucco homes appeared on their right: they looked like toenails painted pink and green and yellow.
“Is that it?” Summer asked, scanning the desert for more homes and seeing only scrub bushes.
“The town is called Friendship, isn’t that cute?” Lorraine said, ignoring her. She pointed to the sign as they sped by and Summer caught a glimpse of the name with the words Established 1913 beneath it.
“Why is there a town way out here?”
“It was a mining town, part of the boom at the turn of the century, I’m guessing. When the minerals run out, the people do, too.”
They passed a row of buildings and she craned her neck around to see what they were: a diner, a place called Red’s and a two-pump gas station next to what looked like a motel...then more nothing. That was it. She slouched back in her seat, disappointed. When her mama had told her they were going to Nevada, she’d been excited about the bright, flashing lights of Las Vegas. But Vegas was at least an hour from where they were going. Friendship was just a boring town in the middle of the desert.
“There’s some kind of famous cactus back there. People drive from all over to see it!” Lorraine was using her overly cheerful voice, something she did when she was nervous.
Summer hated when adults tried to make boring things sound fun; who did they think they were fooling, anyway?
“Cool.” She traced the stitching on the back of the seat, not bothering to look.
Her mother, who usually called her out when she was rude, was leaning all the way forward in her seat, oblivious as she studied the road ahead of her.
“It should be coming up...”
Summer rolled her eyes but scanned the desert for it, anyway.
“Does it look like a prison?” She’d seen them on the Lifetime movies her mother watched: gray places with bars over the windows and people dressed in orange.