Possibly Texas

Chapter 6

My shoes aren’t a dusty brown; they’re actually black.

Dust from the dirt road I’d walked along, while also trying to drag my suitcases behind me without them toppling off of their wheels, was the reason for the color.

A backpack was strapped tightly around my chest. So, with its weight, trying to drag two suitcases, and walking along a dirt road that some municipality forgot to pave, it wasn’t the best day of my life.

They were new kicks my mom bought for me when we were stuck in Tuscaloosa.

The shoes, I mean. A few months before, the alternator went out in her car as we were driving from Atlanta to New Orleans, and Tuscaloosa, unfortunately, was where it happened.

Not that Tuscaloosa—or Alabama itself—is all that bad, but it’s definitely not a place where you want to find yourself stuck.

Especially when none of the mechanics in the entire town can get the specific part needed for your mom’s car in less than four days.

Also, when all your mom can afford is to get a room at a motel just off the interstate and pay for sparse meals created from what she bought in a vending machine, it’s not what you might think of as a glamorous situation.

Now that I think about it, my mom might have lifted the shoes from a store.

She said she bought them for me, though.

Not that traveling with my mom couldn’t be exciting, or even glamorous, at times.

It’s just that Tuscaloosa, staying in a roach infested motel for a week, and living off of snack cakes and beef jerky the entire time, isn’t ideal.

We’d certainly had better times, traveling together.

Like, one time, when we were in Savannah, and my mom was performing in this big theatre there, she met some guy who owned a hotel.

Within minutes, my mom had convinced the hotel-owner-guy to put us up in one of his best suites for the entire three months we were in town.

We’d even get free room service from time to time.

That place had the best hash browns and sausages at breakfast. Lots of cheese and grilled onions for the hash browns. The sausages were always crispy on the outside and soft and juicy inside—fried to heart attack perfection.

Like all things with my mom, the Savannah hotel suite was only temporary. Three months later, the job was over, the hotel owner realized my mom wasn’t looking to settle down, and we were back in the car after mom placed a few phone calls.

My mom is an actress. Not one you’ve ever heard of, though.

Well, I guess she’s more than an actress since she’ll do almost any job necessary to keep us in gas, food, and lodging.

And sometimes a new pair of kicks. Mostly, she chases jobs across America.

A play in a theatre here. A commercial shoot near the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana there.

Voice-over work that has to be done in a sound booth in L.A.

Circus lost their magician’s assistant? Call my mom!

If she’s not busy, we’ll be there as soon as possible.

Do you need a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who looks closer to twenty-five than her actual forty years of age to do your boat show? Call my mom!

She’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to acting jobs.

No job is too big or too small, though most of them are pretty small.

One time she did puppet shows at a theme park in the Ozarks for not much more than minimum wage.

That’s called “scale,” apparently. That job wasn’t so bad, though.

For me, I mean. Mom hated it, but we got to stay in a decent motel that provided fresh towels each morning, had cable, air conditioning, and a swimming pool that was actually kept clean.

And it was all free. The owner of the theme park also owned the hotel, so mom was able to charm him into free accommodations as well.

That’s another thing my mom can do well. Charm people. Especially men.

Almost every guy in America who owns a theatre, production company, hotel, or any place to perform, really, has had me call him “Uncle so-and-so.”

I’m not stupid. I’m sixteen. I know these men aren’t my uncles and I know my mom doesn’t really give a damn about any of them.

Well, maybe she likes them all well enough, I guess, but she likes what they can do for her more.

If a man can provide a job, some place to live—especially for free—or a decent meal, my mom can like him.

I’m probably not making my mom sound great.

But since she was the reason that my new—well, newish—kicks were dusty brown instead of black, my back was hurting, and my suitcases kept bumping violently into my knees, I didn’t really care. That was kind of my mom’s M.O.

Not considering how her decisions affect me, I mean. Gotta make my son live off of junk food out of a vending machine for a week? Sure. What’s that hurt?

There was a time we had to pack up in the middle of the night and leave our motel in Chattanooga because she had pissed off her boss at a theatre.

Another time, she made me hide lunch meat inside of my coat at the convenience store down the street from our motel in Memphis because all we could afford was bread. And it’s hard to make a good sandwich out of just bread.

More than once she’s forced me to busk when she couldn’t find a job—and I can only play, like, three songs. I can’t even sing all that well. And she’d never get the permits for busking when they were required.

Run like hell if you see the cops, she’d say.

I’ve run like hell a lot.

It’s hard to scoop up a coffee can full of coins and loose bills, a guitar, and run from the police, let me tell you. But I’ve managed every time.

I’ve been running like hell since I was probably, like, twelve-years-old, I guess?

Twelve was when my mom thought I was old enough to be dropped off somewhere to busk on my own while she went out looking for jobs or made calls about jobs.

She’d drop me off somewhere and tell me she’d pick me up at a specific time.

In case I had to run from the authorities, she’d give me a “rendezvous point” where she would look for me if I wasn’t at the busking site.

She said if I wasn’t at the busking site, and I wasn’t waiting at the “rendezvous point,” she’d call the police station to see if I’d been picked up.

She never explained what she’d do to get me out since it was rare that we had enough money to pay fines.

And, I mean, would they have even taken me to jail when I was that young?

Do kids get taken to Big Boy Jail or somewhere else?

It’s the twenty-first century. Surely, Child Protective Services would have been called, right?

Fortunately, and somehow, miraculously, we’d never had to find out what happens to twelve-year-old boys whose mothers dump them on a street corner with a guitar and an empty coffee can. I know how to run like hell.

Being dropped off is exactly why my shoes weren’t looking new as I dragged my suitcases along behind me on the dirt road and they wobbled on their wheels with each miniscule bump they encountered.

Two-Mile Trail.

That’s what the sign off of the highway proclaimed the name of the dirt road to be.

It was really just some trail, though. A couple of cars could pass by each other on the dirt road—but just barely.

As I mentioned, the road wasn’t paved, and it wasn’t in the best condition, so I couldn’t imagine anyone would actually want to drive on it.

Especially if their car was new. Or newish.

Like my shoes. They’d just end up with a different colored car and possibly a flat tire.

If it was raining, forget about it. Two-Mile Trail had to be a mudhole when it rained.

Any normal car would probably get stuck quickly and easily.

And good luck getting someone who knew where the hell Two-Mile Trail was to come tow you out.

I couldn’t help but think that there had to be a better way from the highway into town than Two-Mile Trail. Surely, there had to be a paved road on the north side of town. Or the west. Something besides Two-Mile Trail that would lead into Possibly.

That’s where I was headed on foot—instead of in my mom’s car—Possibly, Texas. We had left our motel in Dallas when the sun was just starting to come up. Mom talked a lot as she drove, but ignored anything I said in response. She was a woman on a mission.

Since it had been lunch time, and I had been walking along Two-Mile Trail, my stomach got super pissed at me. My head wasn’t too happy, either.

It was a sugar crash. My diet hadn’t been great for months.

The fact that it was early June—in Texas—and I was walking along a dirt road, dragging two suitcases, sweating like a sinner in church, probably didn’t help either.

Between the heat and my body wanting some real food, it was no wonder I felt like crap.

Furthermore, the fact that the road I was lugging my suitcases along should have actually been called Twelve-Mile Road, made things worse.

Of course, if my mom hadn’t been such an inconsiderate jerk, none of that would have mattered.

When she had seen the sign off of the highway, which we flew by in the car, she had hit the brakes, done a uey, and eased up parallel to the mouth of the road.

We sat there for several moments, eyeing the dirt road proclaiming to be Two-Mile Trail, and I found myself wondering why mom wasn’t turning the car down the road that would take us into Possibly.

It doesn’t look like an easy drive. My mom had muttered. But Jack told me this is how you get to town.

Again, I found myself waiting for mom to turn the car down the dirt road.

It’s only two miles… She had said finally. That’s pretty close.

Next thing I knew, I was standing on the side of the highway, my backpack strapped on, and my two suitcases standing up beside me. Mom had quite literally tossed me from the car.