“What shit?” I asked, shivering.
“Like that. Like, no more saying shit, okay? You’re a new pot of rice, baby. I’m starting you all over from scratch.”
“I’m not hungry yet,” I told her.
She laughed, helped me out of the metal tub. “All you got to do, hon, all you got to do is be a kid. You do that, and I’ll feel so much better.”
“When’s Tameka coming back?” I asked her.
“She’s flown the coop with the others.”
I thought about that, how we’d gone off together like loons with just our thoughts down the highway. We’d almost flown the coop then, but they’d sent a Big Boy after us.
“Hey, don’t give me that look!” My mother turned me around by the shoulders, rubbed a rough towel over my back and neck. “Don’t you feel clean, at least?”
“I’m cold,” I said.
“Just feel clean for a second, okay? Just feel good.” She was crying then, I could tell. I wasn’t facing her, but I could hear her nose dragging with snot. “We’re starting over, you and me. I’m trying to get God on our side, do things different. So you can be a happy little kid again, got it? Can you just be a regular little kid for one second? Please.”
I wasn’t sure what else I could be.
“How hard could it be to smile once?” she begged. Then she crawled around on her hands and knees so she was facing me again. She found the measuring cup, set it on the very top of her head, lifted up her hands. Magic, she breathed. She had tears on her face, a tight-lipped grin, hair that was getting wet from the cup. After a moment, her measuring hat clattered to the floor.
“Last resort,” she warned.
She tickled under my armpits, so I squirmed away.
“Now, how hard was that?” she said, letting me go. I was breathing fast and faster, trying to get it going into a laugh.
“Why does the Fool carry a rucksack?” I asked Rom, pulling up on his blue carpet like grass, moving back and forth with my hand. It was late. All our beer bottles were empty, our burritos gone.
He shrugged. “He’s a vagabond. A traveler.”
“What’s foolish about that?”
“Well, he’s walking off a precipice, for one.”
I hadn’t seen that. I looked at the card again, and it was true. The Fool’s right leg dangled over a cliff, but the Fool’s eyes were closed. He was just walking along—la-de-da.
Rom leaned in closer so I could smell his burrito breath. “But it’s not all bad to let yourself fall. Try it?” He kissed me, open-mouthed, pushing me back slowly to the carpet. The metal pin in his tongue roamed in and probed my gums. That felt good, I thought. That felt a lot like being wanted.
“Wait!” I said, figuring out what he meant. I got out from under him. “I’m not the Fool.”
“But you’re not staying, are you?”
I stood up, straightened my twisted jeans. “Not the whole night, if that’s what you mean.”
“I mean for good.” There was an edge to his voice I didn’t expect. “You’re going back to Ass-crack Nowheresville. Eventually.”
“No, no,” I said.
But as I gathered my jacket from the floor, as I stuffed the burrito papers back in the soggy bag, I found myself adding, “My mom doesn’t even know where I am. I split after my dad died without telling her anything.”
“She’s guilty,” he said.
“My mom?” I turned around.
“No, the traveler. That girl there with her rucksack.”
“Piss off,” I said. “You don’t know me.”
He shrugged. “Go on, Fool.”
The night I got back from the Tall Ships Festival in Duluth, I lay in my loft for a long time, the light from the lamp below drawing moths, flies, mosquitoes. They crawled in through cracks in the screens, through minute gaps in the door and window frames. My mother sat at the table below waiting for me to come and talk to her. I could hear her weight shifting, the pine floorboards groaning beneath her. I could sense that she wanted me to climb down the ladder, to let gravity take me by the ankles, to sit with her and tell her about Duluth. She wanted me to want to tell her about Patra and her family—at last—so she could deride them and their middle-class values, but at the same time be proud of me for getting along so well, for knowing how the world worked, for not fighting it like she had, and did. I could sense her waiting for this. And if I did that, if I told her about the Denny’s soup and the maroon-and-white hotel, she’d make the Gardners seem trivial and bland, utterly ordinary. “Don’t give me that look,” she’d say. “What’s that thing in your hair?” she’d ask. She’d notice the headband right away, and laugh at it, and call me a Teenager.