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Chapter One

Usually Lila Mae Wooten had to scream bloody murder before her kids would pay any attention to her at all. But she was desperately trying to turn over a new leaf, so she pushed the accelerator of the swamp-green 1953 Packard to the floor and smiled at them in the rearview mirror.

    "Well, here it comes, kids--the Kentucky state line!" She had already told them five or six times that the state line was coming up very soon, but they still hadn't given her the type of response she had hoped for.

    "Take a look at them tobacco fields and that blue grass ..." she continued. "It might be years and years before you see 'em again, if ever--if ever." Lila Mae spoke very dramatically, arching her crescent eyebrows and sighing deeply. She was wearing a print housedress and simulated pearls, and her hair had just been tinted Polynesian Spice. Supposedly, it was the exact same color that Rita Hayworth used, but Lila Mae was afraid it was way too loud. "Come on, kids, it ain't right to just drive across like we don't give a hoot...."

    Determined to snag their attention come hell or high water, she said, "I swear there's an awful noise comin' from the trailer. Maybe I should pull over right before we cross the state line and double check." When that didn't work, she took a quick peek in the rearview mirror to see exactly what type of situation she was dealing with, then started to sing: "Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home!"

    Finally, Becky Jean stopped flipping the pages of her Modern Screen magazine and huffed, "We heard you the first time. What do you expect us to do, bawl our eyes out?" A pretty girl and the eldest of Lila Mae's four children, she had a heart-shaped, Miss America face and a rosebud mouth that was usually in one stage or another of smirk. Her caramel hair--flecked with gold and swirling around her shoulders--was styled in a perfect pageboy fluff, and she was wearing pink velveteen pedal pushers and ballerina flats. Looped around her wrist was a sterling-silver Speidel ID bracelet engraved: TO BECKY JEAN, LOVE YA, GLEN.

    "Besides," Becky Jean said in a nonchalant drawl, "what's the big deal about a stupid old sign?"

    "What's the big deal?" Lila Mae craned her neck and gawked into the backseat. "If this ain't your idea of a big deal, leaving the state you grew up in--probably forever--then I don't know what is. I swanee!" No wonder I have to exaggerate everything, Lila Mae thought, there's no way to get through to them kids normally.

    "You act like we're moving to Mars or something," Becky Jean griped. Naturally, her mother, the queen of dramatic rigamaroles, wanted to depart Kentucky in a blaze of ceremonies and turmoil. The best thing to do when she was in a tizzy, which was fifty percent of the time, was to simply give her the cold shoulder. Shutting the Modern Screen, Becky Jean bent down and opened her cosmetics case, where she kept perfumes and dusting powders, two novels, half a dozen movie magazines, Tigress by Faberge, and Can Can Dancer Red, a newly purchased lipstick the color of communion wine. Lila Mae said she'd better not catch Becky Jean wearing the lipstick unless she wanted to be taken for a brazen hussy, and she didn't want her daughter to wear the perfume, either, since she thought it would attract men like flies.

    Locating the Photoplay with Natalie Wood on the cover, Becky Jean straightened up, made a sassy puff of a noise, and picked up where she left off. "What do you expect, anyway? Marching bands with tubas and trombones? Sheet cakes, confetti, tearful mourners?"

    "Mouth off all ya want, Miss Smarty Pants." Lila Mae gave her a mournful warning. "Someday when I'm gone, you'll be sorry you didn't pay more attention to your heritage."

    When they were mere yards from the state line, Lila Mae stopped the car, then took a deep breath and stared sadly at the crystal-white clouds and neon-blue sky. A chestnut thoroughbred galloped across a green meadow and a trio of Kentucky cardinals flitted past the last seasonal vestiges of crape myrtle. Swagged over the gently rolling hills of a horse farm were low, billowy vapors of Ohio Valley fog. Lila Mae gazed at the scene as if she'd never see another horse or bird or swatch of fog for the rest of her life.

    Just when she started to get all choked up, she thought about Loretta Nutt, a woman who'd lost not only her beloved husband but all of her limbs in a horrible train wreck. Even with all that going against her, the woman had managed to raise six kids, worked full time in a dime store, and had even written an entire novel with a pencil in between her teeth! Lila Mae didn't know Mrs. Nutt personally, but she had read all about her in Reader's Digest. So, if a handicapped person could manage all that, then surely, Lila Mae thought to herself, she could handle a car trip across country with a few high-strung, smart-alecky kids.

    Just thinking about the amazing woman gave Lila Mae a sudden gust of optimism. Jabbing the accelerator, she glanced in the mirror to see if she looked as good as she felt; then she tooted the horn several times and began to sing, her voice bellowing and vibrating like Ethel Merman's and her fist whipping the air like a spirited bandleader's. "Cal-i-fooorn-ia, heeere we come, riiiight back where we started from...."

    "Oh, great ..." Becky Jean, her olive eyes smoldering, slapped her magazine shut and clamped her arms across her chest. "Here goes the singing again."

    Since she was peeved at her mother in general--pretty much since she was born--everything Lila Mae did rubbed her the wrong way. Just keeping up with her mother's moods (Lila Mae was like a faucet with two settings, hot and cold) was impossible unless you were a mind reader. One minute she was like a high-speed mechanical doll, excited and animated, as she sang her favorite songs or pointed out interesting scenery. Then the least little thing would turn her rubbery. With a heaving sigh, her arm would drop into her lap with a dramatic thud, but if you asked her what was wrong, Lila Mae would insist with a world-weary sigh, "Oh, nothing." Then she'd continue her suffer-in-silence act, inching the car along the highway as if it was all she could do to keep from collapsing in a heap.

    "Actually, I don't care if we ever make it to California. And at this rate"--Becky Jean noticed that they hadn't actually crossed the state line--"we won't."

    "You'll thank me one day when you marry some big movie star." Lila Mae bobbed her head to punctuate each word. "That--you---will." She turned to Irene Gaye, her infant daughter, who was strapped in the seat next to her, and muttered, "Ain't that right, baby girl?" Irene Gaye had one white curl like the top of an ice cream cone, a constellation of chigger bites on her chin, and front teeth shaped like two small teardrops.

    "Doretta Coombs visited Hollywood and she didn't see one stinkin' star." Twelve-year-old Carleen twisted her birthstone ring and wrinkled her nose at her older sister. "Not one!" She had glittery bleached-blue eyes and a face as golden and cheerful as a sunflower. Her straw-blond hair was pulled into a ponytail so high on her head and tight that it made her eyes slant. On her fingernails were chips of old pink polish, and cradled on her lap was a wrinkled grocery bag full of Katy Keene comic books. Zipping up her rose-red car coat, a Becky Jean hand-me-down, she poked their six-year-old brother, Billy Cooper, in the ribs and told him to quit hogging the backseat.

    "Heeeyyy--stop!" The boy elbowed Carleen right back, then socked her once more for good measure. With his pug nose splashed with paprika freckles and his chipped-front-tooth grin, he looked like Howdy Doody. Sliding his coonskin cap across his burr haircut, he twirled the hat out the window, tracing figure eights in the air. "Goooodbyyyye, Keeentuuuuckyyyy!" Then he reached into his back pocket, slipped out a rubber dart, and loaded it into his gun barrel.

    "This is no time for you to be shootin' that dern thing, unless you're trying to kill your baby sister." Lila Mae turned to her daughters for help. "Can't you girls handle that boy?"

    Becky Jean popped Billy Cooper, who had looped his finger around the trigger. "Stop it, you little brat!" But Billy Cooper pointed the barrel at the windshield, winked one eye in a lopsided aim, and pressed anyway. The rubber dart flew out, grazed Carleen's ear, bounced off the dashboard, and disappeared into a heap of baby supplies and maps. The next dart skimmed Lila Mae's neck, did something to Baby Sister that caused her to slip and slide around, and ended up stuck on the windshield.

    "Good lordy!" Lila Mae wheeled around to slug Billy Cooper, blindly swatting the air with her fist. At the time she figured she could control the steering wheel with one hand and her son, who had managed to dodge her, with the other, but the trailer was more than she could handle. She lost her grip and they ended up way over in the opposite lane. A chorus of honks, like off-key notes from a French horn, blasted a warning as oncoming traffic swerved to avoid the wayward Packard.

    "WATCH OUT!" Becky Jean and Carleen let out an eight hundred-decibel yell. "WE'RE IN AN ACCIDENT!" Billy Cooper screamed. Baby Sister rocked back and forth, gurgling and drooling and kicking her wrinkled legs. The glove compartment flew open, a Kleenex box zipped across the dashboard, and Becky Jean's perfume bottles clinked together like pealing church bells. Worse, it started to rain, and the roads were slick.

    "Good lordy!" Lila Mae gripped the wheel, turning it with all her might. "Stop, please!" she hollered, as if pleading with the headstrong car to obey her. But the Packard, swaying wildly, skidded into one lane, then another. After clipping past the Venus de Milo Figure Salon and narrowly missing the WELCOME TO MISSOURI sign, they sheared the bark off a sweet gum tree and nosedived against an embankment. Finally, they shimmied to a halt in a rupture of dust and mud clods.

    "Lord have mercy!" Lila Mae panted. "We'll be lucky if we don't end up corpses in the Harlan County morgue." She quickly surveyed everyone's condition and carefully avoided the dirty looks and wisecracks she was getting from the other drivers who were slowing down to give Lila Mae a piece of their mind. One angry motorist, petals of rain dripping from his eyelashes, lumbered toward her like Frankenstein's monster, stuck his big, round face against Lila Mae's window, and pumped his curled paw at her. His wife, who had curlicued bottle-brown hair, stood next to him, holding a tepee-shaped newspaper over her head and bunching her eyebrows together in a dirty look.

    "Well, for cryin' out loud!" Lila Mae whipped around, sifting through the baby's diaper bag. "They act like I did it on purpose or something. And I'd like to know where that rain come from--that's what did it." She turned to Baby Sister, propped her up, and massaged her soft spot. "You okay, sugar? ... Now, wouldn't it have been something if that boy had put the baby's eye out?" Still wheezing in anxiety, she tightened the straps on Irene Gaye's car seat.

    "I swanee." Lila Mae's arms fell to her thighs as if they weighed two tons. "My nerves is already shot and we're hardly outta the state. I honestly don't know how I'll ever make it clear cross the country...."

    Although the nervous-breakdown reference was the signal that everyone should feel guilty for the way they treated their mother and totally responsible for any mishaps that occurred, Becky Jean simply murmured, "So what? Your nerves are always shot."

    As for the heartbreak-of-leaving-our-home-state speeches, Becky Jean didn't know what to make of them. For years the shoe had been on the other foot. Lila Mae used to preach to her husband, "It's high time we got out of this pigsty," griping about the ugly Monopoly-board houses, the corroded Kelvinators strewn in front yards, the tufts of brittle dichondra growing on their neighbors' ratty property. Even the weather was dangerous: "Funnel clouds galore ... one right after the other!" Conveniently, she'd pull out a magazine showing Californians wearing Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts. In the dead of winter they'd be barbecuing steaks while their athletic, blond kids paddled around in the family swimming pool. Each house had its own palm tree, in every backyard was an orange grove, and every family was on a first-name basis with two or three movie stars. "Ain't that the life," she'd swoon. When Lila Mae wasn't looking, their father would wink at them. "They don't tell you anything about those earthquakes, do they now?" But to hear Lila Mae tell it, it was Kentucky, not California, that was Shangri-la.

    Oh, it just irked Becky Jean no end that her parents were ruining her life with another wild goose chase. It was bad enough that she was missing her Swan Lake ballet recital and her chance to become prom queen, but she could also forget her dreams of ever being Mrs. Glen Buchanan. She envisioned the familiar scene: the amber glow of Glen's skin; his muscular hand that practically wrapped around her tiny waist; the long drives they took in his red-and-cream Chevy convertible with its radio blasting "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White"; and all those starry evenings when the sky above them was a dome of silver confetti and Glen, covered in the froth of angora from Becky Jean's sweater, would gaze at her with dewy moon eyes and gush, "You are a living doll!" It was only a matter of time, Becky Jean mused, before Belinda Householder would get her mitts on Glen, mere days before they'd mount the swiveling vinyl bar stools at Klink's Drug Store, sharing a chocolate soda and snickering "Becky Jean who?" if her name happened to come up.

    Even still, Becky Jean wasn't about to admit how upset she was, particularly to her mother. Opening the Blue Waltz cologne, she sprinkled the vanilla perfume on her finger, then rubbed it along the eggshell-white bone on her wrist, each pungent whiff reminding Becky Jean of her grandmother. She stooped down to retrieve her transistor radio and fiddled with the white dial, but all she could get was static. Planting the radio up to her ear, she listened to the faraway, blurry noises of her hometown station. Through the jumble of crackling buzzes and twangs, she could barely make out the sound of Doris Day singing "Secret Love."

    Before it was too late, she removed her Evening in Paris compact and sneaked one last look at the reflection of Kentucky in the mirror. Through the fluttery vapor that rose from the highway, she watched the sugar maple trees with their chartreuse-and-burgundy leaves. They quivered and shimmered in the breeze, then became smaller until, finally, they were just one smashed clover-green blur on the horizon.