Her little smile picked up again and then sagged. “Well, you never know when love’s gonna hit you. I thought I’d go on to graduate school and get my Ph.D. in English. Until I met Allen the first day of my senior year. He just bowled me over. All my other plans got put on hold.”
“But then you got your teaching certificate.”
She nodded. “I probably wouldn’t even have gotten that, but Allen thought I should have something to fall back on, just in case . . . as if he knew.”
I thought about Allen. He’d never had much to say to me, but I remembered he had a formal way of talking that made me kind of uncomfortable. As if he were highly educated and wanted everybody to know it. One time he took us down to the lakefront and we rented a sailboat for the afternoon—I remember thinking he looked better when he wasn’t wearing a suit. Still, it was hard to imagine him bowling anybody over.
I figured I should get off the topic of Allen. “Do you think Mom was bowled over by Dad?”
“By Jerry?” Dory gave a laugh. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean that the way it sounds. Jerry was a nice guy, a very sweet guy, but he was too confused in those days to do much bowling over. I don’t think he knew what he wanted—your mother made all the decisions. And I think, once she got pregnant all she wanted was that baby—you—but she thought she’d better get Jerry into the picture, too, or Grandad would really throw a hissy fit.
“Jerry was the one who was bowled over. He didn’t know what hit him. He was crazy about your mom, but the poor guy was just a kid himself—he was in no position to be raising a kid. Nobody was too surprised when he left, including your mother.”
“So she didn’t love him?”
Dory thought about that. “She probably did, but maybe not as much as she thought at first. She was young. They both were. Sometimes it’s hard to tell about love until afterward. When you look back.” She swallowed hard.
“You loved Uncle Allen, didn’t you?”
She nodded and gulped more coffee.
I probably shouldn’t have asked her that. I wondered if she’d known it while Allen was alive, or if that’s what she meant by sometimes it’s hard to know until afterward. “How come Mom never dated anybody else? Until now, I mean.”
“Maybe you should ask her these questions,” Dory said. She looked tired, so I decided I’d better shut up. But then she answered me, anyway. “Karen never thought any guy was good enough to be your dad, that’s what I always thought.”
I looked out the window while I let that sink in. The thing is, you don’t think about your mother like that—she’s just your mother, the person who tells you to hang up your clothes and eat your broccoli. But now I was imagining her at twenty—a few years older than me—getting married, having a baby, getting divorced, becoming this Supermom who wouldn’t even go out on a date with somebody unless they were daddy material. Was Dory right about that? And if she was, what was so special all of a sudden about Michael Evans? Or was I grown up enough now not to need a father?
Of course, I already had a father. Jerry Daley, a nice guy, as Dory said. A nice guy I never really got to know, who eventually married a nice woman and moved to Arizona.
What would it be like to see him again? What if he’d said I could visit them because he felt guilty about me, but now they were all dreading it? Allison was probably already complaining about having some kid she hardly knew sleeping on her couch. What if she was one of those neatniks who make you take your shoes off outside? Or what if she was a terrible cook and I couldn’t stand eating what she served? Or what if she didn’t want David to know he had a half sister? There could be all kinds of problems. Maybe stopping in Phoenix wasn’t such a great idea after all. I leaned against the window and stared at Minnesota farmland until I conked out, too.
When I woke up, Marshall was reading aloud from one of the guidebooks in the backseat. “The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, has been standing for over seventy-five years. It is built out of reinforced concrete, but every spring the outside of the building is completely covered in murals and other decorations made from bushels of corn, grain, and grass. Mitchell is called the Corn Capital of the World and the Corn Palace is sometimes referred to as the World’s Largest Bird Feeder.”
I sat up and rubbed my stiff neck. “Are we in South Dakota?”
“Yup,” Dory said. “Headed for the Corn Capital of the World.”
“And lunch,” Marshall added.
The landscape looked drier than it had in Minnesota, kind of parched for so early in the summer. But the Corn Palace itself, when we pulled up in Mitchell, was spectacular enough to keep even Iris quiet for a few minutes.
“It really is made out of corn,” Marsh said.
“No false advertising,” Dory agreed.
“It doesn’t look like it belongs here,” Iris said, trying her best to be negative.
“The onion domes and minarets make it look Russian, don’t they?” Dory said.
I could figure out that the onion domes must be the big round ornaments on the roof, but I wasn’t sure what a minaret was. Probably the swirly roof decorations that reminded me of a soft-serve cone from Tastee-Freez.
“They redo the outside every year?” I asked. The golden murals were quite intricate, portraying farmers on tractors and birds swooping low over cornfields.
“That’s what the book says.” Marshall actually seemed to be excited. “They even named their high school teams the Kernels.”
“That’s corny,” Iris said, then blushed and gagged at her unintended joke. “I’m starving,” she said. “Can we please eat?”
There was a restaurant up the street that looked fine and we all ordered big lunches—those muffins hadn’t lasted us long. I’d never seen Iris eat so greedily. Normally she could have pecked at the biggest bird feeder in the world and been satisfied, but today she was stealing French fries off her mother’s plate while simultaneously stuffing a bacon cheeseburger down her throat. Dory didn’t seem to notice any difference.
Personally, I’d been pigging out since Chris left. My shorts had even gotten a little tight, so I decided to go easy on the grease for a while. Iris’s comment about my saggy middle was a little too close to home these days, so I let her pick through my potato chips while I ate a turkey sandwich.
“Are we staying here tonight?” Marshall wanted to know.
“Nope, we’ve still got a long drive ahead of us.”
Marshall groaned.
“Where are we staying tonight?” Iris asked. “Not in another one of those crummy hotels, I hope. And not all in one room either.”
Dory swirled a fry around in her ketchup pool. “Well, we will be in one room, but not in a hotel.” All three of us looked at her—it didn’t sound good. “I made a reservation for us to camp in the Badlands National Park tonight. Isn’t that great?”
I tried to rally a smile, but the idea of being within earshot of Marshall for a second night in a row was less than thrilling. Plus, in a tent we’d really be on top of one another. But I was definitely not the person most annoyed by the idea of camping out.
“You’re kidding! You expect us to sleep in that tent?” Iris glared at her mother.
“Of course! Why do you think we brought it?”
“I thought it was just for an emergency—like if we got stuck someplace where there weren’t any hotels!”
“I don’t want to sleep outside all night,” Marsh said, chewing his bottom lip.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be in a National Park,” Dory said.
“The Badlands . . . that sounds inviting,” Iris said. “Why are they bad? Because the wildlife eats the tourists?”
“There aren’t any bears, are there?” Marshall asked. “I’m not sleeping outside if there are bears!”
Dory closed her eyes. “There won’t be bears. We’ll be in a campground area, with many other people. It’ll be fun.”
Iris slumped down in the booth. “This sounds so stupid, Mom! Sleeping in a tent surrounding by a lot of other
people sleeping in tents—how is that fun?”
“It just is, isn’t it, Robin?” Dory looked at me for reinforcement, but I knew Iris and Marshall didn’t care what I thought, and, anyway, I wasn’t nuts about the idea either. Still, I was supposed to be Dory’s helper.
“It can be, yeah,” I said. “I like camping at Thunder Lake.”
Dory grinned. “Oh, I used to go there, too. Grandad would take us all and he’d build a big fire and we’d roast hot dogs . . .”
“You don’t even know how to build a fire,” Marshall said. He was rhythmically kicking his sneaker into my shin as he glared at his mother, arms folded protectively across his chest.
“Well, we’ll eat in town before we get to the campground. It’s a warm night—we won’t need a fire.”
“This is a very bad idea, Mom,” Iris said, shaking her head.
“No, it isn’t,” Dory said sternly. The kids weren’t used to Dory saying this is just how it is, so they argued a while longer, but what choice did they have? What choice did I have, for that matter? It was Dory’s car and the rest of us were along for the ride, wherever the ride might take us.
We stopped for dinner at Wall Drug Store because Marshall demanded it. There had been signs for hundreds of miles advertising the place, which turned out to be not only a drug store, but a restaurant, a playground, and a huge gift shop selling all kinds of cornball stuff: cowboy hats, little painted drums, Indian dolls, leather coin purses, ugly belts. Marshall wanted a T-shirt with a jackalope on it and Iris got a silver bracelet and two dozen silly postcards to send to her friends. Dory kept asking me if I wanted anything, but what would I do with any of that junk?
By the time we got to the campground it was almost dark. We found our reserved spot without too much trouble. Our little plot was between two other groups, both of whom had brought along everything from toddlers and puppies to CD players and cell phones. Why not just stay home?
Getting the tent up wasn’t hard—Dory had gotten one of those new pop-up kinds so it was almost foolproof, but apparently she hadn’t tried it out since she bought it. The screen flap wouldn’t zip closed—when Dory forced it, it jumped the track altogether.
“Dammit! They have a nerve charging so much for something that breaks this easily!” she said.
I tried to get it back on track, too, but it was impossible. We were all still so tired from the night before, we just rolled out our sleeping bags and flopped down on them.
“Oh, well, we don’t need it zipped—the fresh air is nice,” Dory said.
“God, this ground is all rocky!” Iris said, shifting from side to side. “I hope there aren’t any snakes.”
“Snakes?” Marshall said in a weak voice. But he was already half asleep and way too exhausted to fight it.
I heard Iris swat at a mosquito, but her swear was barely audible either. It gave me hope that we might all be able to sleep through the night.
We must have slept like we were in hibernation. I was pleased to wake up and see that no bears had made us their midnight snack. But I’d hardly had time to appreciate this when I realized a much smaller creature had found its way through the unzipped screen and feasted on our slumbering bodies: the lowly mosquito—and a few thousand of his friends.
I brushed my fingers lightly across my stinging ear and neck, which made them itch more than ever. My right arm, which had been lying outside the sleeping bag, was also full of hot red lumps. No sooner had I sat up to survey the damage than Iris woke too and began screaming.
“I can’t see anything! I can’t open my eyes! Mom!”
Dory was out of her bag instantly and crouched at Iris’s side. “Oh, my God. Your eyelids are swollen shut! How . . . what . . . ?”
“It’s mosquitoes,” I said, holding out my arm. “I’ve got a million bites, too.”
“Mosquitoes? They bit my eyes?” Iris started to cry, which looked really pathetic, the tears squeezing out beneath her puffy lids.
Now Marsh was awake, too, taking it all in and checking himself over. “I only have a few. Just on my jaw,” he said. “Wait, here’s one on my forehead.”
Dory had some on her face, too, but Iris must have tasted better than the rest of us. “It looks like you and Robin got the worst of it,” Dory told her daughter. “Robin’s arm is swollen, too.”
Like Iris would care. “Do something about my eyes!” she commanded through her tears. Typical.
“I’ll go to the snack bar and get some ice, sweetie. That’ll take down the swelling some.” Dory pulled on her shoes and a sweatshirt and crawled through the open door. “Don’t cry! It’s over now.”
Iris was feeling the lumps and bumps on her face. “It’s not over. I look like a freak!”
“That’s for sure,” Marshall said.
I couldn’t decide which of them annoyed me more. “Do you two always have to make a bad situation worse by picking on each other?” I said. “It makes me glad I don’t have siblings.”
“She does look awful!” Marshall said.
She did look pretty bad, but I actually felt a little sorry for her, bawling through her battered eyes. “It’s not that bad,” I said. “And besides, you should be thinking about how to help her, not how to make her feel worse!”
“Why? If my eyes were swollen shut, she wouldn’t be thinking about how to help me.”
True. I gave up and crawled outside to wait for Dory. She was running back across the campground with several zippered plastic bags filled with crushed ice. “The guy at the snack bar was really great. Apparently this happens all the time.”
Marshall came outside to take his bag of ice from Dory, but Iris was staying hidden. Everything but her voice.
“How could you do this to me?” she yelled. “First you make me go on this stupid trip with you and then we have to sleep in all these horrible places—even outside—and now my face is totally ruined! Do you hate me? Is that why you’re doing this to me?”
“Iris, calm down now,” Dory said.
“She’s not just doing this to you, you know,” Marshall put in from his post outside the door.
“Keep the bag on the bites,” Dory said, but her voice sounded . . . oh no, like she was ready to cry, too.
“Marsh, put the ice bag on your bites,” I said, running mine up and down my burning arm.
“Mine aren’t that bad.”
“Well then, shut up,” I said. He glared at my face, and then, remarkably, said nothing else. I took the bag from him and handed it inside the tent to Dory so Iris could have one for each eye. “Marsh doesn’t need his.”
Quiet tears were cascading from Dory’s eyes, too. “Thank you, Robin. I’m sorry about this. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have made you sleep outside when you didn’t want to. And then with the broken zipper . . .”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“I have to pee,” Iris whined. “Do they have bathrooms out here in Sherwood Forest?”
Dory sighed and struggled to her knees. “There’s a public rest room just a little way up the path.”
“I’ll take her,” I said. “I need to go, too.”
“Oh, good,” Dory said, wiping away the tears and trying to sound normal as she and Iris came out into the sunlight. “Marsh can help me take the tent down, and then we’ll go back to Wall Drug and get some calamine lotion. And breakfast.”
I could tell Marshall was about to start complaining about having to help his mother, but I gave him a look I hoped was terrifying and he only frowned. I took Iris’s arm to lead her to the bathroom.
“You don’t have to grab me,” she said.
I waited until we were out of earshot of Dory and then I said, “You don’t have to be a bitch either. Ever thought of that?”
She pulled her arm away from me. “I can see the ground well enough to walk by myself. Just make sure I’m going in the right direction.”
Yes, your Exalted Crabbiness. I let her stumble a little on the step up to the bathroo
m, then grabbed her arm tightly. “Whoops!” I said, and maneuvered her in the door. She felt her way into the stall and banged the door behind her. I used the stall next to her, then waited for her by the row of sinks.
“Your right eye is opening a little bit,” I said when she emerged. “If you keep the ice on them, they’ll both open up soon. My friend Franny got badly bitten once when we camped at Thunder Lake, and we . . .”
Iris banged out of the stall and felt her way over to the sinks. “You know everything, don’t you? You win the Good Camper Award.”
A young woman with two small boys came out of another stall and washed her hands and theirs at the sink next to us. She glanced up at Iris who was looking into the mirror out of the thin slits of her eyes, trying to get some idea what she looked like.
“Wow! I guess you forgot the bug spray!” the woman said.
“My mother forgot the bug spray. And broke the tent zipper.”
“Well, those things happen,” the woman said, shrugging. “It’s all part of camping. Don’t let it ruin your day.” She chased her little boys outside.
“Is she kidding? Where do all these perky people come from? Is that a farmer trait, or something? Don’t let it gitcha down, yuk, yuk! I wouldn’t live in these backward boondocks if you paid me. Just because she grew up here, Mom thinks she has to expose us to it. I’d rather be exposed to pneumonia.”
Suddenly I’d just had it with all her insults and nastiness. “You are such a brat, Iris! Just because your mother treats you like royalty doesn’t mean you are. This is a vacation, even though you and your brother are doing your best to turn it into a death march.”
She put her head back and tried to look at me from underneath her lids. “What do you know . . . ?”
But I didn’t let her talk. “For God’s sake, you’ve got some mosquito bites, and you’re acting like it’s malaria! Get over yourself! If you and Marshall intend to spend the whole summer bitching and moaning about every single thing, I swear I’m going to find a bus station and go back home. Because being around the two of you really sucks!”
She continued to squint at me for another minute and then turned back to the mirror. “The right eye is going down a little, isn’t it?”