The Great Good Summer (15 page)

Chapter Twenty

I
spent my whole livelong life trying to be a good girl,” says Mama. “But it didn't seem to help, or matter. Because every single Sunday of my childhood, no matter how good I'd been, my daddy would preach a sermon with the angry breath of God behind him. I knew that he
and
God were keeping tabs on me, and I was terrified of them both.”

Terrified.

I feel a tiny crack open inside me, but not enough to turn her way.

“But then I grew up a little and I was blessed with your daddy, Ivy, the sweetest man who ever lived.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I say, 'cause I feel like I owe that to Daddy.

“And with you. You were a baby made in God's image if ever a baby was,” Mama says. “I've had such a happy life with you both. It's like you washed away all the fire and fear that came before you.”

She stares straight ahead and drives in her careful way
as she talks. She stops talking when a huge loud truck goes flying by, making our little car wobble and rattle in the wind. Mama's arms clench up tight till the shaking stops. And then she drives on, quietly. Really quietly. It makes me impatient.

“But if you were so happy with us, why did you leave?”

“I wish I could take that back, Ivy, I promise you.”

Which, you'll notice, isn't an answer.

“There was something about those wildfires that just got me spinning straight out of control,” she says. “When I learned that my daddy's church burned down, I felt so sad and so sorry, even though he'd been gone for years.”

“You felt sorry for him? For Granddaddy? Even though he never felt sad or sorry for
you
?” I shift in my seat so I can actually
see
what she's thinking, not just hear it.

“You didn't know him, Ivy. He was a good man deep down. Really,” Mama says, almost like she's scolding me. Never mind that all I've ever heard about Granddaddy is how loud and angry and scary he was. I play her words back over in my head to be sure she said what I think she said.

“Mama, pardon me, but that's crazy talk. He scared you and he made certain you were scared of God, too.
How is that good at all?”

I turn back to look at Paul, for sympathy or confirmation or something. He looks a little horrified to be included. He stares at me without so much as a blink, so I turn back to Mama, waiting till she answers.

“Okay, honey, wait. We're getting off track,” says Mama.

Off track? What track were we on? The Granddadddy's-suddenly-good-and-made-me-go-to-Florida track?

“For whatever reason, those fires made me miss my daddy—they just did—and missing him led me straight out to the Tomko Center, where Davey Floyd had set up his ministry. Davey was so familiar. His voice, his preaching . . . I got sucked straight in. I couldn't help it.”

And as she says that, I remember something Paul said at the park one day, about his daddy telling him a career in space was “impractical.” And how Paul said that
he
kinda thought it was impractical too, but he couldn't resist it anyway.

“Is that how it's been with you and space, Paul? Like you couldn't help yourself?” I ask. “Like no matter how impossible it seems, you just want to be a part of it anyway?”

Poor backseat Paul. I keep dragging him into the con
versation, I guess because Mama's answers aren't very satisfying to me.

“Um . . . ,” he says, but Mama doesn't give him a chance to finish.

“It's just that everything makes such perfect sense if you listen to Pastor Lou,” says Mama. “Even
God
makes sense. Davey arrived and reminded me of the
other
parts of God—the fire and the anger, but the mystery and miracles, too. So, yeah, I guess that
is
a little bit like space, isn't it?”

I guess. But even if we're comparing God to space, I still don't get why Mama would leave us for it, or for him. And she doesn't say.

She just goes on about how Davey turned out to be a swindler and a stone-cold fake. (With a hair bun and glassy eyes, I think but don't say.) And about how the police came to shut down The Great Good Bible Church—which wasn't really any kind of church at all—and how she ended up in the hospital, so far from home.

“I was lying there feeling sorry for myself,” says Mama, “when I thought of God in scripture, saying, ‘Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.' Just like that. And in some crazy roundabout way, that's what I'm trying to do now.
I've made everything so complicated, Ivy, when really, my only job is to love the people I've been given to love. My own daddy, for all his preaching, wasn't very good at that. But I am.”

“Well,” I say. And then I don't say another thing, because actually, this summer, she hasn't been very good at loving us at all.

After Mama finishes her quote-unquote “explanation,” we drive on for hours without any of us uttering a single solitary word. It's fine for a while—a relief, really—but now it's pitch dark and the silence is starting to feel a little creepy. I wonder if I should turn on the radio. Or talk to Paul. Or maybe say a prayer.

Then I think about how Mama and Daddy didn't give me a middle name in order to leave room for God. Maybe that's what we're doing now. Leaving room for God. Or for one another. Or for that one clear voice Mrs. Murray told me about. Maybe.

Mama keeps driving, and it just keeps getting darker and darker and quieter and quieter. The truth is, that “leave room for God” explanation has never made me feel any better about my missing name, and it's not helping me feel better about this creepy quiet car, either.

Chapter Twenty-One

W
hen you drive around this part of Florida, you can tell right away that the space program is a big deal. The newspaper they gave us at the hotel has a little orbit drawn around the O in “Today.” There are signs everywhere for the Kennedy Space Center, and a restaurant called Planet House, and a Laundromat called Sonic Clean. There's even a street called Astronaut Boulevard. Honestly, it's like space is as important to the coast of Florida as God is to Loomer, Texas.

“Hey!” says Paul as we pass another billboard with the space shuttle on it. He points as it disappears behind us. “No way. Did y'all know they call this ‘the Space Coast'? Man. How good does it get? I live in the wrong place, that's for sure.”

I'm kind of awed that Paul would suddenly imagine himself up and moved to a place he hardly knows a thing about. I kind of want to defend Loomer, since it's not that bad a place to live, never mind that we
did
run away. Temporarily.

But I don't say anything about feeling awed
or
defensive, because I'm just relieved that somebody in this car is talking again. Driving across an entire state in almost total silence is harder than you'd think.

At the motel last night Mama and I each got a bed, and Paul slept on the floor. Which I thought was a mighty injustice, since Paul had been sleeping in cars and buses for three days, and Mama had been in a fancy motorized hospital bed with people bringing her soda pops and bendy straws.

But Paul is a gentleman, and he was not gonna take a bed from a lady. He actually said that. (Maybe Paul is a better example of distinguished than his dad, after all.)

This morning I flopped across the backseat of the rental car, still kind of sleepy, even though I had a bed of my own last night, and Paul sat up front with Mama. That's where he is now, straight and tall, looking out the front window and then the side one, and then the front one again, sort of vibrating. I know he's smiling his little half smile even though I can't really see it from back here.

“You're excited, aren't you?” I ask, and as I do, I feel almost a kind of jealousy. I don't know if I've ever loved or wanted anything as much as Paul loves and wants space.
I mean, a dog, maybe. But dogs are an ordinary thing to want and not quite the same as space. I guess I wanted Mama to come home pretty badly, but that was more like a necessary repair than a dream.

“Excited? Are you kidding? Of course. I mean, my dad took me to the Johnson Space Center in Houston a million years ago, because I drove him crazy begging and pleading. But then he talked the whole way there and back about what a long drive it was. Which is why I totally can't believe you did
this
long drive for me, Mrs. Green.”

If you ask me, Paul is being nicer to Mama than she deserves, but I don't want to spoil his joy, so I let it be. Plus, he's right, it has been a pretty long drive. This morning we don't have an actual plan since we haven't exactly been on speaking terms, but Mama's following signs to the space center, which makes as much sense as anything else, it seems to me.

I pull myself up to look out the windows with Paul. It's flat as flat can be out there, but very pretty. I mean, if a town is surrounded by the ocean, of course it's pretty.

“So, Paul,” says Mama, probably just glad that
someone
is talking to her, “have you been interested in space forever and ever? I mean, since you were small?”

I realize I don't even know the answer to that, which might mean I'm not a very good friend. Ever since Paul and I started getting to know each other, I've been so caught up with Mama gone missing and all, I haven't asked him all the questions friends are supposed to ask.

“Yeah, always,” says Paul. “I asked for a telescope when I was five. I didn't get it, though. My mom and dad gave me a pair of kid binoculars instead, with a picture of Woody Woodpecker on them. I don't think they quite got what I wanted to do.”

“Parents often don't,” says Mama.

Which is kind of an interesting thing for a parent to say.

“Paul was gonna be an astronaut, but then they decided to stop shooting off space shuttles, which ruined the whole plan,” I say.

“Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I would've ever really gotten to fly,” says Paul, “but, yeah . . .”

He's back to looking out the window, and I can see why. We have to cross another long bridge to get out to the space center, so we're sort of floating over a million gallons of salt water. There are gulls and grasses everywhere—it's like we're leaving the city and entering someplace wild. Not as in crazy wild but as in the
actual wilderness. I wasn't expecting it to be like this, but maybe you need to be in the middle of nowhere if you're going to shoot stuff off.

'Cause then, right when you think there's nothing out here at all except for beach grass and birds, we see them. Straight ahead of us, growing up out of the earth like giant trees—rockets.

“Oh my God,” says Paul.

“No kidding,” I say, because honestly, it's pretty awesome-seeming so far.

What's not awesome is this:

Getting into the space center costs a fortune.

Maybe not an actual fortune, but considering that Paul and I have approximately zero dollars and zero cents left, from the hundreds of dollars we started with (thanks to whatever happened to me and my pouch back in Houston), and with Mama giving all her money to Hallelujah Dave, apparently. Well. It's a lot of money.

I think about Mama's credit card.

I think,
This is an emergency,
but I don't say it out loud.

We stand in front of the ticket booths, hot and dizzy. There are so many choices about which tours to do, and which sections to see, but none of them are cheap.

“I, um . . . I should've checked on this before we came. To see how much it cost,” says Paul. “Wow. I'm sorry about this, y'all.” He isn't vibrating anymore. People march past us to buy tickets, but we just stand with our hands in our pockets. Our empty pockets. I actually feel kind of empty through and through.

“Okay, so here's what we're going to do, gang,” says Mama in a sunshiny Sunday school voice. “I'm pretty worn down after running out of the hospital like I did, and then making the long drive and everything. What I need to do is sit and have a coffee and spend some time on the phone with your daddy, Ivy. Being a tourist is too much for me today. It truly is. So the two of you will go on in, and we'll meet back here—”

“Wait, Mrs. Green. I don't—”

“No ifs, ands, or buts, Paul,” says Mama, and away she goes to buy our tickets like a real, honest-to-goodness grown-up. Which is how we end up, just Paul and me, in the Shuttle Launch Experience, taking off.

We buckle into big roller-coastery seats that lean way back as the launch starts. It is windy and noisy, and the seats shake and buck and suck and press, and the miles fly by on the screen up front. My butt hurts and my back
hurts and my head hurts, but I hold on to the shoulder railings and close my eyes and bump along.

And then? The next thing you know? We're flying. Floating. Our seats tilt forward. It is like gravity is gone and we are as far as you can imagine from anyplace we've ever known.

“Yes,” says Paul, almost like a sigh. “This is awesome.”

And then he says, “Wow.”

'Cause there, right in front of us, is Earth, floating in a sky of stars. An Earth we're no longer on. It's enough to make you dizzy.

We walk out of the big tube that is supposed to be the space shuttle, and our fellow astronauts all seem as thrilled as Paul. I'm pretty sure I heard the words “dream come true” more than once. I'm glad for them, but wow, that's not exactly how I would put it. Once the crowd clears, I stop for a second to catch my breath.

“Okay,” I say. “Well. It's official. I'm not gonna quit my day job.”

Paul laughs. “Your day job, as in babysitting? Are you gonna be a babysitter forever?”

“Well, no. I'm not sure what I'm gonna be, but ‘astronaut' has been officially crossed off the list, due to the
fact that even a fake space launch made me both sick and scared.”

“Sometimes scary can be exciting,” says Paul.

“How do you know?” I ask. “You're not scared of anything!”

“Everyone's scared of something. I'm scared of dogs.”

I'm about to accuse him of just trying to make me feel better, when I remember the dog at the bus stop in Tallahassee. I start to giggle. “All dogs,” I say, “or just dogs in sweaters?”

Paul rolls his eyes and says, “Seriously. Are you gonna pick your career based on what you're scared of?”

“Well, no. I'll use a process of elimination, I guess, till I'm left with something I really like. And all I know right now is, no astronauting.”

“‘Process of elimination,' huh? If I didn't know you better, Ivy Green, I'd say you were being scientific.” Paul's eyes twinkle, and his hair is all scruffled and he's back to that kind-of-cute look I noticed earlier. I don't know why—he's still in the same jeans and hoodie he's been wearing for days. Maybe it's just that he's happy.

“Ha! I don't think so,” I say. “You sciencey guys are all ‘if, then' about everything, with your hypotheses and stuff. I always get stuck on the ‘if' part.”

I mean, honestly. I'm as likely to become a scientist as Paul is to become a preacher. I don't get around to saying that aloud, though, because a group of kids in matching purple T-shirts moves in between us, their guide walking backward as she talks.

“Space,” says the guide, “is what we call the final frontier. But it's not called a frontier because we will move there and develop it someday, like we did in the American West, or even because we plan to visit, although we've done a little of that already. It's a frontier simply because it is the edge of what we know and understand. Space is a mystery that we want to know more about. When we look up at the stars, we notice their beauty, and we wonder about them. That's how all of our astronaut heroes began their journeys, you know—looking up at the stars and wondering, like you and I do.”