After she calmed down or maybe just ran out of steam, she put her hazards on and set out the little orange triangles she keeps in the back. She wrapped a blanket around me and put the iPad on the Nick Jr. app. It took her an hour and she lost her hat in the snow, but she did it. She changed that flat in the freezing-cold middle of nowhere America. When she climbed back in, we sat for a minute and listened to Christmas music while the van warmed up, and she wiped the black off her hands with wet wipes. It was nice after it wasn’t scary anymore. And then we drove on.

If there’s one thing I know about Mom, it’s that she can do just about anything. I’m hoping that’s still true. I’m hoping she can help Grandpa. Help him in the way he needs, I mean. Fixing a tire’s not quite the same as fixing a person.

We hit Oklahoma just as the sun goes down, and it’s everything I remember—flat as a pancake for miles and miles. The roads are bumpy with tar crisscrossing over the cracks like a zebra’s stripes. My chair rattles in its harness, and I have to put away the book I’m reading so I don’t puke.

There’s no snow here, and I can see the red dirt edging up against the trees when we turn off the highway. It’s big pines and oaks, taller than anything we have back home, kind of like driving into Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood.

We turn off Route 9 onto the gravel road that leads into Mema and Grandpa’s neighborhood. When they first moved here after he quit his job in Midwest City, he called it a “retirement village.” He said it wasn’t a trailer park if nothing ever moved. And he was right. People here tuck their trailers up under these trees and lock them down with cement foundations and wood porches, so you can hardly tell where the wheels used to go. They build sheds and fill them with tools for their gardens and then fence it all in.

When we pull into 713 Alcoa Drive, the headlights snag on the smashed-up front of Grandpa’s Ford, and it’s so pitiful I look away, down at my chair, creaking as we bump over the gravel. Trailers. Trucks. Bodies. There’re so many things wanting to move that the air feels electric with it, like when the hair stands up on your arms before a lightning strike. But I’m so tired, all I want is a bed and a blanket. If Mom’s going to break the news to Mema that we’re here to stay, I’ll need to be ready and rested, because there’s sure enough going to be a storm.

4 Trailer Living