“You mean you didn’t hear it all from wherever you were spying?” I asked, but I was mostly teasing.
I knelt on the floor and opened the drawers underneath my bed to rummage through my clothes. Mom waited on the other side of the curtain, so I couldn’t really see her, but I knew exactly how she was standing—arms folded over her chest, toe tapping anxiously on the floor, her lips in a thin line and her eyes cast down in a mixture of anxiety and feigned indifference.
It wasn’t that my mom didn’t care. In fact, it was the opposite—she cared far too much. But we were now at that awkward stage in our relationship where I was legally an adult, but still a teenager who lived under her roof, albeit a small and nomadic roof.
Not to mention that her job was taking a toll on her, so she wasn’t able to do as much as she once had. That meant many of the adult responsibilities—like cooking and cleaning—had fallen to me.
“I only watched through the window of Gideon’s trailer,” Mom said, as if she hadn’t had her nose pressed to the glass. “I wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“Gabe’s perfectly safe,” I told her, but the second the words were out of my mouth, I wondered how I could be so sure. So far, everything in Caudry wasn’t exactly as it seemed, and everything had a sinister edge to it.
Finally, Mom had enough of talking to me through the curtain, so she pushed through the beads and sat down on her bed behind me.
“Then why haven’t you told me about him?” she asked. Underneath her concern, I heard a pained current.
I temporarily abandoned my search for an outfit, and I sat with my back still to her. “I don’t know.”
“You know, everybody knows everybody’s business around here,” she said quietly, as if everyone was crowded outside our doors, listening. “That means I’ve known for days that you’ve been running around with some boy, a rich townie, and I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. And you never did.”
I turned to face her. “I wasn’t trying to keep it from you. I just…” I sighed. “I knew it wasn’t anything serious, and I didn’t want you to lecture me about not being safe or getting too attached.”
“Oh, qamari.” Her mouth curved into a sad smile. “You’re a young woman. You want your own life, your own dreams, your own loves. I wouldn’t expect any less from you.
“When I was your age, your grandma Basima was still dragging me around the country, chasing the promise of riches or love from yet another snake-oil salesman.” My mom affected the same weary tone she always did when she talked about her mother.
I hadn’t known my grandma all that well, since she’d died when I was three. By the time I was born, Grandma Basima had already started spiraling. Mom claimed that Grandma had overused her powers as a necromancer, and it drove her crazy.
Around the time I was born, she developed dementia-like symptoms, and my mom had to put her in a special home. It was impossible to care for my grandma and me while traveling on the road.
The only thing else I really knew about my grandma had to do with the skull key with the ruby eyes my mom wore around her neck. I couldn’t see it now—it was tucked safely beneath her top, so she could wear it next to her skin—but I knew the key was there. It was always there.
The key belonged to Grandma Basima’s steamer trunk that I’d only seen a handful of times, despite the fact that we carried it with us always. My mom kept it in the cargo area of the Winnebago, below the floor.
When I was young, if I tried to touch it, Mom would slap my hands and tell me to never touch it. It’s not for play, she had warned me, and as I got older, she explained to me that the trunk contained tools of the dark arts.
“She’d had hundreds of boyfriends and thousands of jobs, and none of them were ever the right one,” Mom explained. “So I promised myself that one day I would settle down, fall in love, and have a family.”
She forced a smile so pained, I was afraid she might crack. My mom always tried to hold herself with such dignity, despite our circumstances, but underneath, I knew how much she hurt.
“But I didn’t know how to escape, so I gave in to temptation and used the gift your grandma passed down to me,” Mom went on. “The spirits never left me alone, making it impossible to hold down a steady job, and your father…”
She trailed off, letting that hang in the air for a moment. “Well, your father couldn’t handle the life of a bedouin, but not many can.”
“It’s not a bad life,” I said, and that was true.