Chapters (37)
Climbing into the driver’s seat, Summer closed the door gently behind her and looked around. Everything smelled new. She leaned around the front seat to see into the back. The gut of the RV had a living room preceded by a small kitchen. To the rear of that were two closed doors that must be the bedroom and bathroom. There was no indication it had been lived in. Reaching across the passenger seat, she opened the glove box. When she was little her dad had kept Tootsie Rolls in the glove box. She pressed the button that sprang the little door open and found a pile of notebooks stacked inside. Summer's forehead creased together as she reached inside to retrieve one. Opening it, she saw with surprise that it wasn’t a notebook at all, and she was staring at a photo of her mother, but the name beside it didn’t match. Staci Cartright, it said. Born August 3. That was not her mother’s name or birthday, and yet the passport she was holding said it was. Shaking her head, Summer reached for another. They were all photos of her mother, matched with strange names. She put them all back as she’d found them and moved this time to the stack of driver’s licenses, bound by a rubber band. Summer found her mother’s real driver’s license. She squinted at the address: Forsythia Drive. It was the old one, the apartment they’d left in the middle of the night. According to the front of the card, it was expired. Among the other cards, she found another face that actually matched the name: it was Feena’s father, Jon Wycliffe, his thinning hair limp across his forehead, his eyes two dead brown puddles. They were from a place called Rolla, Missouri. She stared at his photo long and hard, wondering if Feena got her looks from her mother.