Mom Abandoned Me to Save Herself novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Eighteen Years

Clem fires into the dirt and raises her; at twenty-five she's driving his rig when the TV shows the Kesterson gala for missing women and a barefoot woman with a chain scar comes through the diner door.

I shut my eyes.

I could hear him breathing behind me, hard.

Then two shots, so loud the hawks went up out of the trees below.

I waited to fall down.

I didn't.

When I opened my eyes, there were two smoking holes in the gravel a foot from my boots.

Clem was on his knees beside them. The gun was in the dirt.

"I can't," he said. "God help me, I can't."

He got his phone out. His hands shook so bad it took him two tries.

He put a finger to his lips at me.

"It's done," he said into it.

A pause.

"Yes, sir. Down the ravine. Nobody'll ever find it."

He hung up and threw up over the rail.

Then he picked me up and put me in the sleeper behind the seats.

There was a narrow bunk with a green blanket that smelled like coffee and diesel.

"Sleep, honey," he said. "We got a long way to go."

He drove down the far side of the mountain, away from the hollow and away from Baltimore.

He quit the Kesterson outfit three weeks later and told them his lungs were shot.

They were.

He wrote his own last name on my school forms.

That's how I got to be Jessamine Cutter.

Eighteen years later I was coming down I-79 at four in the morning with forty thousand pounds of drywall behind me.

Mile marker 155. Morgantown in seven.

I say the numbers out loud when I drive. Plates, mile markers, times.

Other people remember faces.

I remember the white Freightliner with Ohio plate PJT 4418 that cut me off at mile 129 last March.

The Peterbilt was mine now. Clem gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday with a bow stuck to the grille.

I took the exit and swung into the lot of the Cutter Stop.

The sign out front was missing its second T. It had been missing it for six years.

Clem was at the flat-top in his flannel, flipping eggs with one hand and coughing into the other elbow.

"You're nine minutes late," he said without turning around.

"Flagger at the bridge."

"You flirt with him?"

"He was sixty."

"So's half your fan club."

The waitress set coffee in front of me before I sat down.

She had a pencil through her bun and no patience for anybody.

"The driver from Tulsa asked about you again," she said.

"The one with the ponytail?"

"He's got a nice truck."

"He's got a ponytail."

"You said the last one was too clean."

"He ironed his jeans."

"Honey, you're going to die alone in that cab."

"Leave her be," Clem said. "She's going to die alone with me. I'm fine with it."

I ate my eggs.

When I got up to pay, I touched the frame by the register like I always did.

It was a photo of me at eight, holding up a catfish as long as my arm, with Clem grinning behind me.

Behind the photo, in a sandwich bag, was a folded paper soft as cloth.

I'd touched that frame every morning for eighteen years.

Clem says I do it like a ballplayer touching the bag.

The TV over the counter was on the news.

A ballroom full of chandeliers. Women in long dresses. A banner across a stage.

THE KESTERSON FOUNDATION FOR MISSING WOMEN.

My fork stopped halfway to the plate.

A man with silver hair stood at a podium. He'd gotten thinner in the face. His eyes hadn't changed.

"Eighteen years ago," Lucius Kesterson said, "I carried my wife out of hell. Tonight we make sure no family waits the way mine did."

The room stood up and clapped.

He held out his hand, and a woman in pearls stepped up beside him.

Her hair was a sleek blond bob now. Her dress was cream silk.

She'd never touched dirt in her life.

"I had nothing up there," my mother said into the microphone. "Nothing and no one. My husband gave me my life back."

The waitress leaned on the counter beside me.

"Isn't that the lady that got kidnapped? They did a whole movie on her."

I didn't answer.

On the screen, a tall young man in a navy suit kissed my mother on the cheek.

The caption said AUGUSTUS KESTERSON, NAMED HEIR TO KESTERSON FREIGHT.

He had her eyes.

Clem reached up with his spatula and switched the TV off.

A trucker at the end of the counter complained.

"Watch it at home," Clem said.

He didn't look at me. He put another egg on my plate that I hadn't asked for.

The bell over the door rang.

Everybody looked, because nobody comes into a truck stop at that hour without making noise first.

A woman stood in the doorway.

She was maybe twenty-three. Her hair was matted. She had on a man's shirt and nothing on her feet.

Her feet were bleeding on Clem's clean floor.

Around her left ankle was a ring of shiny scar, the kind a chain leaves when it's been on a long time.

I knew that scar. My mother had it.

She looked past the truckers and found me, the only woman at the counter.

"There's nine more of us up there," she said. "They're bringing a new one Friday. On a Kesterson truck."

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