Where the Stars Still Shine(3)

“You don’t have a choice,” Mom calls from her bedroom.

I blink, startled that she can read my mind. Then I realize I’ve said it aloud. Now she’s going to be mad at me again.

“You’re my daughter,” she snaps, heading out the front door. “Where I go, you go. And I’m going in one minute.”

I tuck spare underwear—which I refuse to buy in thrift stores—into the empty spaces of my suitcase. My blue toothbrush. My journal, so thick with notes, stories, poems, and postcards I’ve collected over the years that I keep a wide pink rubber band around it to hold in the pages. Most of my life is recorded in this book, starting from when I first learned to write in crooked letters. Most. Because there are some secrets you don’t even want to tell yourself.

My minute is up when I hear a beep from the old battleship-gray Toyota Corona that my mother bought from a junkyard with her bartender tips. I zip up my suitcase, blow out a tired breath, and touch my jeans pocket, feeling for the bump of the evil eye bead. The Toyota beeps again, telegraphing Mom’s impatience.

The last thing I do is put away my guitar, an old rosewood and spruce Martin with a mahogany neck. Mom bought it in a pawnshop in Omaha. A Christmas present when I was eleven. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen a guitar before, but as she flirted with the guy behind the counter, trying to get him to raise his offer on a ring she was selling, I fell in love with the Martin. She didn’t get the extra cash she was after, but he threw in the guitar. Mom said maybe I’d be the next Courtney Love. I didn’t tell her that on one of the pages in my journal I’d written “I hate Courtney Love” over and over until the page was covered. My feelings aren’t so strong about her now as they were back then, but that was before her Hole cassette finally came unraveled. Anyway, my Martin is a war zone of scratches and finish cracks, but the sound is still as rich and resonant as if it were new.

“Ready to go?” she asks, as I get in the car. She tries to light up a smoke, but her hands are shaking. That troubles me in a way I can’t identify. I take the cigarette from between her lips, light it, grab a quick drag, and hand it back. She flashes a smile, and for a split second I see the girl she used to be. The girl who held my hand as we walked to the bus stop on the first day of kindergarten. She was impossibly beautiful then, with her platinum pixie hair and bare legs ending in battered Doc Martens. People stared at her, and my heart felt too big for my chest because she was my mom. We reached the stop, and she perched on the back of the bus bench while we waited, smoking a cigarette.

“You’re gonna do fine at school,” she said that day, blowing the smoke up and away from me as she stroked the back of her hand over my cheek. “A girl as smart as you can do anything.”

I believed her then, when we lived in a real apartment with houseplants, pictures on the wall, and a tiny balcony that overlooked a river. She worked at a coffeehouse near the park, and when the bell rang at the end of the day, she was always there, leaning against the empty bike rack. Now I don’t get complacent because we don’t ever stay.

“Where are we going?” I ask, as Mom pulls away from the curb.

She always has a plan. Even when we sneak away at three in the morning, she has our next future mapped out in her head.

“Oh, I was thinking Colorado might be nice,” she says, which surprises me. We usually head toward warmer climates when the weather gets colder. “What’s the capital of Colorado?”

When I was little, she’d help pass time on long bus rides by quizzing me on the state capitals. I graduated to countries as I got older, but she had trouble remembering all the countries, let alone their capitals. Her fallback has always been the states, even though they’ve been burned into my memory for years.

I groan. “I don’t feel like playing this game right now, Mom.”

“Humor me.”

“It’s Denver. The capital of Colorado is, was, and always will be Denver.”

She blows out a puff of smoke that gets sucked through the crack at the top of her window. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve been sure since I was six.”

Mom laughs. “You could learn to ski in Colorado.”

I roll my eyes.

“Well, you could,” she insists. She reaches over and strokes my cheek with the back of her hand. Her fingers are rough from washing glasses during her bartending shift. “A girl as smart as you can do anything she wants.”

I don’t say anything. Because if I did, I’d tell her she’s wrong. I can’t get a library card. I can’t window-shop at the mall with friends. I can only wait for the day she gets paranoid because the man at the gas station looked at her funny or she just knows the women she passed on the sidewalk were whispering about her. Then we leave. I don’t say anything. Because if I did, I’d tell her I don’t believe her anymore.





We’re headed west on US 34 when blue lights flash from behind, and my heart slides up into my throat. I hold my breath, waiting for the patrol car to shoot past us after its actual target. It can’t be us, because Mom always follows the speed limit. She uses turn signals. We wear our seat belts.

“He’s probably after someone else,” she says.

Except traffic on the highway is thin this time of night, and when my mom pulls over onto the gravel at the side of the highway, the patrol car follows. The inside of the Corona is awash in blue light that illuminates her face. My insides go cold when I see an expression there I’ve never seen—fear.