Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe by Mike O'Connor

Author:Mike O'Connor [O'Connor, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55543-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

WHY DID IT TAKE me until I was fifteen to begin to really give up on my parents? Sometime before that the average fool might have yelled out: That's it! I wasn't a fool, but I wanted to believe that our parents were smart and wise in the big matters and forgivably human in the rest of their mistakes. That's what I wanted to believe, so I did.

In our world, we thought that our parents were the only adults we could trust. Before leaving Monterrey, I'd worried about the secret that held so much power over us, but I thought our parents could still protect us. They'd always stood for what was strong and sure and right—until the debacle of our trip to California, which proved that they could be pathetically wrong. True, our other trips had been underlain with fear and moments of great vulnerability—as at a border—but they lasted only hours. The road to California was potholed with endless fiascos that crushed my faith in our parents. We were a tiny band of nomads who had to count on their leaders, and the leaders had failed us. They were just and good, and certainly bold. They had conquered many obstacles. But they had failed, and they couldn't cover it up anymore. I finally began to see it.

If they'd only told me the truth about us, I might have accepted it and trusted them.

As it was, I began to blame them for everything that was wrong about us: our perpetual fear; the deceit that tried to smother the fear; our life's uncertainty, which could catapult us from any home with little warning; my own social isolation and my never expecting to fit in anyplace we lived. I blamed them for our extreme financial precariousness, which had slapped us in the face on the road to California and had begun to seem perpetual.

WITH ALL OF that, the vision that appeared as we descended the Diablo Range of mountains into the Santa Clara Valley was so entrancing that it briefly overwhelmed my disillusionment, even if it felt as if we'd walked from San Antonio and dragged the trailer behind us on a rope. The hills were low and green, with doilies of orange poppies and huge patches of mustard flowers that ran around the fruit trees and scattered in every direction. There were orchards everywhere and farmers in straw hats and kids in kiddie cowboy shirts hawking fruit from little roadside stands.

“Oh my, just look!” Mom kept saying, and we did. Five faces smeared with tension and exhaustion gawked out from the windows of a road-stained station wagon, with a parrot trying to keep his balance on the front seat and six water bags hanging off the bumpers.

“Well, kids, we did it,” Dad kept saying, because he couldn't believe it either. He looked around at us in the back with a smile that was bigger than the bug-smeared windshield.

After a few nights at the Oasis Motel just south of San Jose,

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