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Chapter One
"Terri, did you see the kitchen?" Phil Mueller's voice echoed off the walls of the empty room.
"I'll be there in a sec." Terri was checking out the bedroom that would be hers if they took this apartment. "Bed over here," she said, pacing around. "Bureau here?" And she imagined her posters tacked up, covering every inch of bare wall, including cracks and stains. She liked the long windows that faced on a little bit of a park across the street.
Her father came into the room. "Nice, very nice," he said, looking around. "Don't you think so?"
"How much is the rent?"
He shrugged. "Not cheap, but not a killer, either. We can go for it. Looks like a nice neighborhood, too."
"I could walk to school from here," she said. They had passed the junior high on the way from the rental agency. "But there's no garage, or side parking. Did you notice? That means parking the camper on the street"
"Camper's kind of big for street parking," Phil said.
"It's not that busy a street," Terri said. "If we still had our Pinto it wouldn't matter so much."
Phil groaned. "You'll never stop talking about 'the Pinto, will you, Terri?"
"It was my sweet little car." Right up until last year they'd had the Pinto with the. stick shift. Red Ryder, her father called it. Whenever they drove at night Terri would climb over the front seat and curl up in back to sleep. Barkley was always very alert and excited in the car and would sit by the back window watching everything and taking up more than his share of space. But even though she had to really scrunch up, Terri never minded and always slept in the car just as well as she did inher own bed.
In fact, since they'd had so many apartments, but only one Pinto, she had thought of that almost as her real home. Speeding along the highways between cities and states, she and her father chewed over where they'd been living and where they'd live next, what kind of place they'd look for, and the interesting people they were sure to meet.
Often, when they traveled, they ate out in diners and restaurants, but just as often they'd shop in a supermarket and buy special things to eat in the cat like Loma Doones and bunches of green grapes. Their favorite traveling food, though, was always a plain old bread. bologna, cheese, and lettuce sandwich.
They didn't have too many rules in their life because Phil said-and Terri agreed-that the main rule was to be thoughtful about each other. That covered a lot of territory, such as each of them letting the other know where they were at all times, and not waiting for the other person to clean up any messes Barkley made in the car, though, they did have rules, such as no eatingpeanuts in the shell (too messy), and no soft drinks (Phil didn't approve of the caffeine), and no driving while sleeping. That was Terri's rule for Phil, because she wasn't old enough yet to share the driving.
Once she had asked him how he decided where they'd move to next. "Well, I don't really decide, Terri," he'd said. "We just get in the car and go, until it feels like it's time to stop. When something clicks — I trust that. I trust my instincts and feelings. You know how it is."
But, in fact, the didn't know, didn't really under stand that sense of being carried along by instinct. She began to think of her father as emotional and herself as rational and sensible.
She was a tall girl with long hair that she sometimes wore in a single braid down her back, and, sometimes parted in the middle with a wing of hair pulled back and held with a barrette on either side of her face.She was quiet and watchful and didn't talk a lot, although she liked to talk, especially to her father, with whom she felt she could talk about anything, They were close, very close, companionable, and easy with each other, and she sometimes thought of him as her real best friend, distinct from the best friends she made in whatever school she happened to be attending.
He had taught her to drive in the Pinto when she was eleven years old. On Sunday afternoons in a deserted parking lot, she'd practice J turns, parking, and stopping on a dime. Her father would laugh and say, "Terri, you'll have your driver's license before you have your learner's permit."
She had always thought she'd take her driver's test in the Pinto, but last year on her twelfth birthday, they traded in the Pinto for the camper truck. She had hated to see the Pinto go and shed real tears for it, as many, in fact, as for the various mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs who had come and gone in her life.
But quite soon she became devoted to the camper and hoped they would never trade it in. The, cab was like an ordinary pickup truck, but in back a little metal house sat on the truck bed. Inside were two beds, a sink, propane refrigerator and stove, table and benches, and a minute bathroom with a chemical toilet. Everything was small and every bit of space was used. There was a water tank underneath and a metal luggage rack on top.
"The camper makes us completely free," Phil said when they bought it. "Anytime we get the urge to travel, we can just go, Terri. And stop wherever we want They rarely stayed in any place for more than six or eight months. Terri had heard her father say, "I've got restless feet,"...
