Chapter 10 - Reclaiming the Room
On Monday morning, I drove my Hyundai Elantra into the bay at Discount Tire on Jacksboro Highway.
The young man with grease on his forehead lifted the front right tire with both hands, showed me where the black rubber had peeled back to reveal the crisscrossed steel threads, and shook his head.
“Ma’am,” he said, “the good Lord was personally holding this wheel together on the highway.”
“Put four new ones on,” I said.
“All four?”
“All four,” I replied. “The best ones you have with the sixty-thousand-mile warranty.”
I sat in the waiting room with a small paper cup of weak coffee, listening to the pneumatic wrenches scream as they spun the lug nuts off my wheels. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. It sounded like progress. It sounded like steel and rubber between my daughter and the road.
When I picked Junie up from school that afternoon, she didn't walk to the car with the dragging, hesitant steps she’d used for the past four months.
She ran.
Her backpack bounced against her shoulders, her glasses sliding down her nose, her gap-toothed smile bright under the three o'clock sun.
She threw her backpack into the back seat, climbed into the front, and slammed the door.
“Mom! Look!”
She held up a piece of construction paper.
It was an A on her fourth-grade social studies project—a diorama of the Texas Missions that she had finished on the floor of the La Quinta while Travis was packing his bags.
“Mrs. Henderson said my Alamo had the best detail,” she said proudly, kicking her heels against the seat.
Then she stopped.
She looked through the windshield.
“Mom... the car doesn't shake anymore.”
I smiled, putting the Hyundai in drive, feeling the thick, deep tread of the new Michelins grip the asphalt with an easy, silent strength.
“No, baby,” I said. “It doesn't shake anymore.”
We stopped at the grocery store on the way home.
We didn't buy hot dogs. We didn't buy store-brand lemonade.
We bought two ribeye steaks, three ears of sweet corn, a punnet of fresh strawberries that smelled like summer, and a four-pack of expensive lime sparkling water in glass bottles that clinked against each other in the brown paper bag.
When we got home, Junie didn't hesitate at the front door.
She walked inside, dropped her shoes by the mat, took her backpack down the hall, and closed the door of her room.
Not because she was hiding.
Not because she had been sent there.
Because she wanted to sit at her desk, under her lamp, by her window, and draw in her sketchbook without anyone asking her to share, without anyone telling her that blood meant surrender, and without anyone making her feel small in the only world she was supposed to be safe in.
I stood in the kitchen, listening to the radio play softly from the counter.
Through the window, the sun was beginning to drop behind the live oaks, casting long, peaceful shadows across Belknap Street.
My phone sat on the table.
There were four missed calls from an unknown number in Keller—Travis, calling from whatever burner phone or borrow he was using today.
There was one text from my mother: *“I hope you’re happy with yourself.”*
I picked up the phone.
I didn't open the text.
I swiped across the screen, selected Judy Vance’s contact, and pressed *Block.*
May you like
Then I selected Travis Vance’s name, and pressed *Block.*
I set the phone down on the clean, empty oak table, picked up a glass of cold water with a slice of fresh lime, and walked down the hall to watch my daughter do her homework.
