Sprout

We must’ve made a wrong turn at Albuquerque
    My dad and I moved here four years ago, when I was twelve. Long Island to Kansas. Fifteen hundred miles, most of it on I-70. We drove it in twenty-three hours, pausing only for food—McDonald’s, Cracker Barrel, more McDonald’s—and gas. There was no reason we didn’t stop. It’s not like there was anything waiting for us in Kansas. It was more like we were trying to get away—or he was trying to get away, and I was his hostage. I’m not even sure Kansas was our destination, or if it’s just where my dad ran out of steam. Maybe it’s just where he realized he couldn’t run away from his memories.
    A few days after sixth grade ended, he woke me up and told me to pack.
    “How much should I pack?”
    “Pack everything you need.”
    There was something edgy about his voice, out of control.
    I glanced at the clock. 6:53 A.M. I wondered if he’d started drinking already. I sat up, tried to slow things down.
    “Well, how long are we gonna be gone?”
    My dad looked around my bedroom. The only room I’d ever called my own. It took him maybe five seconds to take it all in—the posters, the dresser and bed, the clothes strewn on the floor—and then he turned back to me and said: “Pretty much forever.”
    He rented the second-smallest-sized U-Haul and we packed our stuff in until it was full. Anything that didn’t fit we left behind. Somehow all the things that didn’t fit belonged to my mom: her clothes, her dressing table with the big circular mirror, every single dish in the kitchen. I took her picture though—the framed wedding portrait that had hung in the same spot for so long that the paneling had changed color beneath it. Or, I guess, stayed the same color while the rest of the walls faded. The picture had faded too, yellowed a bit. My mom’s skin and dress both had an ivory, kind of sickly tone to them. But maybe that’s just projection on my part: it’s hard to look at the past and forget what you know about the future.
    Her eyes stared out at me, bright, focused, fearless. They looked into the days ahead as though they were filled with nothing but health and happiness. I could almost understand why my dad ignored it with each trip to the U-Haul, but I took it anyway. Wrapped it in a sheet from my parents’ bed, which my dad also didn’t pack, and slipped it into the soft space between two sofa cushions. I took her jewelry box too, and her favorite book.
    I’m not going to tell you the title, though, because that’s mine alone.
    During the drive my dad kept talking about how we needed “space.”
    “Distance.”
    “Fresh air.”
    “A fresh start.”
    “Country living, Daniel. That’s what we need.”
    “Good country people.”
    I let him talk. I’d brought a dictionary into the cab of the U-Haul, and I thumbed through it at random. Rhumb, foramen, collogue: the line followed by a ship sailing in a fixed direction; an opening, an orifice, a hole; to speak flatteringly or feign agreement. Sometimes the words had some kind of association with what my dad was saying but usually they stood alone, bricks of meaning without any mortar to hold them together. Just like the words that came out of my dad’s mouth.
    “It’ll be different, Daniel. You’ll see. Everything’s gonna change.”
    Even after we set up camp in the Trail’s End Motel, we continued driving. Only this time, instead of following a single endless ribbon of highway, we crisscrossed Reno County. Hutchinson is the big town, with about 30,000 people, and over the course of a week it seemed we drove each and every one of its streets, west to east, north to south, even the alleys. Eight miles to the east was Buhler, the moon to Hutch’s earth. The only thing that stood out was the school, not so much because of the way it looked (like, bricks ) but because my dad said, “I guess that’s where you’ll be going.”
    It wasn’t until these words came out of his mouth that I realized he was doing more than getting the lay of the land. I suppose it should’ve sunk in sooner, but the whole trip was so unexplained I hadn’t really pondered what it meant. What the consequences might be. But all of a sudden it was clear: that ochre brick building, rectangular yet amorphous, was going to be my new school. One of these dusty streets would bear my new address. Long Island, the ocean, my friends—my mom—were all just memories now.
    In a way, it was almost as though all we’d