Three Rivers by Tiffany Quay Tyson

Author:Tiffany Quay Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466868366
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Sixteen

Melody was dead tired but slept badly. She dreamed she was being hunted by a pack of hungry wolves. To protect herself, she tossed small children to the growling beasts. She woke before dawn in a sweaty nightmare panic. At least she wouldn’t have to lie there and pretend to sleep, as she did on the road. Even in good times, Melody slept poorly, suffered from hellish dreams, and woke before sunrise. When she was sharing a tour bus or cheap hotel room with her bandmates, she couldn’t just get up and get on with her day. Now, in her family home, she was free to roam at all hours. Everyone in her family woke early, and it was normal to find one or all of them prowling around the house before daylight.

She decided to make good use of the time by searching for clues of her mother’s whereabouts. In her parents’ bedroom, she pulled everything she could find from the closet and chest of drawers. She piled it all on the bed and sat cross-legged in a mess of dusty boxes and old photo albums. The first box, an old cardboard boot box, overflowed with yellow newspaper clippings, nearly all of them featuring Melody’s mother wearing some sort of fancy white dress and, often, a tiara. She was the Maid of Cotton, Miss Junior Miss, Miss White Forest Senior Year, homecoming queen, prom queen, and, of course, a young bride. All of it just reinforced Melody’s belief that beauty was more important than substance to most people. How else could her mother, selfish and crazy as a loon, have ever become so popular? Melody moved on to a huge album. A spider skittered out from between the pages, and she brushed it off the bed with a shudder. The book was filled with photographs. Melody flipped through the snapshots. Familiar scenes flooded the pages: her father holding a big catfish, her mother laughing at something off camera, Bobby as a toddler, Melody as a teen. She didn’t want familiar scenes from the past; she wanted something that would lead her to her mother today. In the past, Melody was too timid or too young or too awed by her mother to tell her how she felt. Not anymore. Now she couldn’t wait to find her mother and tell her that she was selfish, insane, and mean as a snake. Someone had to say it.

She heaved the album aside and pulled out a small box. It was a child’s keepsake box, with a slot for a key. She pried it open without much force. A lemony scent filled the room, and a few bits of brown and green flecked out onto the quilt, a dried plant from an old corsage or a clipping from the wishing bushes out back. Mama had brought the wishing bushes back after an unexplained disappearance. She never told Melody or Bobby where the bushes had come from, just that they should plant them and make a wish.

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