Alive Day

Alive Day

1

The American Dream

Summer 1992

Grammie and Granddad’s home was one story and brick and sat on a three-­acre pecan orchard that pushed against a small forest. I was crouched under a pecan tree, thrusting a gnarled stick into the muddy grass. A storm was coming. I could tell by the way the wind had shifted, the air had cooled, the sky rumbled softly in the distance. Mom had called for me, but I wasn’t ready to surrender to an evening trapped indoors. I ignored her and hid behind a tree, knowing she wouldn’t come looking.

The stick hit something hard—­a root or a rock—­and snapped just as I looked up and saw a cat. It was around fifty yards away, fully exposed, and looking straight at me. With a spotted coat and mutton chops, it was more magnificent—­and much larger—­than any cat I’d ever seen. Slowly, I stood up, startling it. The cat darted away, disappearing into the forest. Though part of me knew the creature wasn’t something I should fool with, I was disappointed that it had vanished so quickly. I’d always been drawn to mysterious and dangerous things. I just wanted to get a better look.

“Come back!” I yelled. But nothing.

I considered chasing it. Instead, I threw the stick and ran between perfect rows of aged pecan trees toward the screened-­in back porch, swung the creaky screen door open, and kicked my muddy shoes off as quickly as I could.

“Mom!” I yelled. “Mom!” The door was already cracked open, and I pushed my body into it and ran inside. A warm, savory smell hung in the air as I ran across the living room toward the kitchen, where Mom and Grammie were chatting and pulling casserole dishes from the oven. Mom turned around and put a steaming dish on the bar that separated the living room and kitchen.

“Whoa! What is it, baby?” she said as she pulled off her oven mitts and laid them on the bar next to the food.

“Mom! Guess what I saw!”

“What did you see?”

“A cat! The biggest cat ever! It had a beard and was looking at me and it’s gone now!”

Mom scrunched her face. “A big cat?” She turned to Grammie. “Are there mountain lions around here?”

Grammie stirred something on the stove with a wooden spoon before tapping it on the edge of the pot, laying it on the counter, and turning around to look at my mom. She was shorter and wider than Mom, with wispy blond hair and a thin mouth that sat in a crooked line. She put her hand on her hip. “Not that I know of. Could be. I bet it was that bobcat Johnny saw when he was mowing the other day.”

“A bobcat!” I said. “Cooool. I bet it’s still out there. I bet I could find it!” I started toward the door.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold your horses!” Mom said, shaking her head. She was tall with hair cut like Princess Diana’s, only dyed black, and she was thin enough it looked like she rarely ate. When she was worried, she couldn’t hide it. The muscles in her body would tense, and she’d move rapidly, eyes squinting, head shaking, cheeks flushed. She’d become almost twitchy, her arms crossed and then at her hips and then crossed again within seconds. “Honey, bobcats aren’t pets. They can hurt you.”

I sighed dramatically. “Mom! It didn’t seem mean . . .”

“They’re very cute, but they have sharp teeth and big claws. Why don’t you go change and get ready for dinner?”

“Can I just have ten more minutes?”

“No, baby. Go change,” she said. She picked up my sister Kirsten, then licked her thumb and mopped it across Kirsten’s juice-­drenched chin. “Eat?” Mom said, and Kirsten repeated, “Eat! Eat!”

I groaned. “Fine.”

I moped through the living room, down the hallway, and into the back bedroom that my two younger sisters and I shared. There were only three bedrooms at Grammie and Granddad’s house: one for them, one for my parents, and one for us. We hadn’t been in Alabama long, only a couple of months. After serving ten years, Dad had decided to leave the Army. I was just about to turn seven. He had been deployed every other year, fifteen months each time, and he wanted to be more present in our lives. Dad was as mysterious to me as that cat in the yard. Most of the memories I had of him were from videos he made while he was in Korea. He’d record himself reading me books from his barracks across the sea. The room he filmed in had unadorned walls, and my dad, an almost stranger, would lie on a small bed in the center of it reading Amelia Bedelia, pausing every so often to adjust his thick-­rimmed military-­issued glasses.

After years of this, he decided he wanted to be home more. “If I stay in any longer, Karie won’t know me,” he said to my mom, and she agreed. She was tired of being a single parent. They used educational loans to buy a white Aerostar van and moved us from Washington State, where they had been stationed, to Alabama, where my dad’s parents lived. They thought moving closer to family would be good for us. Grandparents! Cousins! Aunts! Uncles! The American Dream! I loved it. My sisters and I had cousins our ages who would visit us at Grammie and Granddad’s house. We’d play on the swing set in the backyard, splash in puddles that collected in the ditch after storms, create clubhouses in the branches of fallen pecan trees. To me, it was perfect. But one morning, as I was looking through Granddad’s drawers for a small box of foreign coins I secretly liked to play with, I overheard my parents complaining about how suffocated they felt. They were eager to find us our own home, but nothing about Alabama was as easy as they’d anticipated.

“We need you to find a job,” my mom said to my dad at the dinner table later that night. Her body was rigid, her lips pursed. I took a bite of my corn casserole.

“I’m trying,” he promised her. Looking deflated, his large frame shrinking in his chair, he closed his eyes and rubbed circles between his eyebrows. He’d gotten his master’s in psychology online from Liberty University while he was in the military. It was his second attempt at getting a degree. The first was at Toccoa Falls College in Georgia. That’s where my parents met. They’d both been involved with a school play, and on opening night, when it was time for my mom to take the stage, she was so overcome with anxiety, she couldn’t do it. She hid backstage in tears. My dad, a lanky stagehand with a halo of brow ringlets, sat with her while she cried. He was taken by her blue eyes and thought her North Carolina drawl was cute. That week, he asked her if she wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle, expecting her to say no. She was shy and soft-spoken, and he saw her as an innocent southern belle. When she said yes, he was elated. They quickly became inseparable, and eventually he proposed. She said yes again. By then, college had proven to be too difficult for Dad. He was losing interest and struggling to keep focused. If he wanted to have a family, though, he would need to provide for them. He didn’t have family money to fall back on. The military, with all its promises and benefits, seemed like a good plan B.

Now, no longer in the Army and with no relevant work experience, he struggled to find a position that paid enough to provide for all five of us.

“Just take what you can get. I can get a job, too. We’ll figure it out,” Mom said. Kirsten squirmed in her lap, pawing at a spoonful of food that Mom brought to her mouth.

“I didn’t serve for ten years to be poor,” Dad replied. He put his fork down. “Maybe I should’ve just stayed in. Waited for retirement . . .”

“And spend half your kids’ lives deployed while I play single mom back home? No. It’ll get better. It has to.”

I looked at my sister Kelsey, who was sitting next to me. I gently kicked her foot. When she looked up, I crossed my eyes and opened my mouth full of chewed-­up food, attempting to ease the tension. She half-­smirked and kicked me back.