18
I guess becoming homeless doesn’t happen all at once.
My mom told me once that money problems sort of sneak up on you. She said it’s like catching a cold. At first you just have a tickle in your throat, and then you have a headache, and then maybe you’re coughing a little. The next thing you know, you have a pile of Kleenexes around your bed and you’re hacking your lungs up.
Maybe we didn’t become homeless overnight. But that’s what it felt like. I was finishing first grade. My dad had been sick. My mom had lost her teaching job. And all of sudden—bam—we weren’t living in a nice house with a swing set in the backyard anymore.
At least that’s how I remember it. But like I said before, memory is weird. It seems like I should have thought to myself, Whoa, I’m going to miss my house and my neighborhood and my friends and my life.
But all I remember thinking was how much fun living in our minivan was going to be.
19
We moved out of our house right after first grade ended. There was no big announcement, no good-bye party. We just sort of left, the way you abandon your desk at the end of the school year. You clean it out, but if you leave a few pencils and an old spelling test behind, you don’t worry about it too much. You know the kid who has your desk next fall will take care of things.
My parents didn’t own a lot of stuff, but they still managed to fill our minivan. You could hardly see out the windows. I saved my pillow and backpack to load last. I was putting them onto the rear seat when I noticed something odd.
Someone had left the back windshield wiper on, even though it was a sunny day. No rain, no clouds, no nothing.
Back. Forth. Back. Forth.
My parents were packing odds and ends in the house, and Robin was with them. I was all alone.
Back. Forth. Back. Forth.
I looked closer. The wiper was long and awfully hairy.
It looked a lot more like a tail than a windshield wiper.
I leaped out and ran to the rear. I saw the dent in the fender from the time my dad backed into a shopping cart at Costco. I saw the bumper sticker my mom had used to cover the dent. It said I BRAKE FOR DINOSAURS.
I saw the windshield wiper.
But it wasn’t moving. And it wasn’t hairy.
And right then I knew, the way you know that it’s going to rain long before the first drop splatters on your nose, that something was about to change.
20
When the minivan was packed, we stood in the parking lot. Nobody wanted to get in.
“Why don’t I drive, Tom?” said my mom. “You were in a lot of pain this morning—”
“I’m fine,” my dad said firmly. “Fit as a fiddle. Whatever that means.”
My mom strapped Robin into her car seat, and we climbed into the minivan. The seats were hot from the sun.
“This is only for a few days,” said my mom, adjusting her sunglasses.
“Two weeks tops,” said my dad. “Maybe three. Or four.”
“We just need to catch up a little.” My mom was using her there’s-nothing-wrong voice, so I knew something was really wrong. “Pretty soon we’ll find a new apartment.”
“I liked our house,” I said.
“Apartments are nice, too,” said my mom.
“I don’t get why we can’t just stay.”
“It’s complicated,” said my dad.
“You’ll understand when you’re older, Jackson,” said my mom.
“Play Wiggles,” Robin yelled, squirming in her car seat. She loved the Wiggles, a group that wrote silly songs for kids.
“First a little hitting-the-road music, Robin,” said my dad. “Then Wiggles.” He slipped a CD into the car player. It was one of my mom and dad’s favorite singers. His name was B.B. King.
My mom and dad like a kind of music called “blues.” In a blues song, somebody’s sad about something. Like maybe they broke up with their girlfriend or they lost all their money or they missed a train to a faraway place. But the weird thing is, when you hear the songs, you feel happy.
My dad makes up lots of crazy blues songs. Robin’s favorite was “Ain’t No PB in My PB&J.” Mine was called “Downside-Up Vampire Bat Boogie,” about a bat who couldn’t sleep upside down, like bats are supposed to do.
I’d never heard the B.B. King song my dad had chosen to play. It was about how nobody loved this guy except his mother.
“What’s he mean about how even his mom could be jiving him, Dad?” I asked.
“Jiving means lying. It’s funny, see, because your mom and dad always love you.”
“Except when you don’t floss,” said my mom.
I was quiet for a while. “Do kids always have to love their mom and dad?” I asked.
I caught my dad’s reflection in the rearview mirror. He looked back at me with a question in his eyes.
“Put it this way,” he said. “You can be mad at someone and still love them with all your heart.”
We pulled out of the driveway. Aretha sat between Robin and me. She was only a few months old, and still had her puppy-soft fur and clumsy paws.
Our neighbor Mr. Sera was cutting yellow roses from his garden. We’d already said official good-byes. He waved and we waved back, like we were on our way to the Grand Canyon or Disney World.
“Does Mr. Sera have a cat?” I asked. “A really big cat?”
“Just Mabel,” my mom answered. “The Chihuahua with an attitude. Why?”
I glanced back at the rear windshield, but it was blocked by boxes and bags.
“No reason,” I said.
My dad cranked up the volume on B.B. King, who was still pretty sure nobody loved him, including his mom.
Aretha cocked her head and howled. She liked to sing along, especially to blues songs. Although she liked the Wiggles too.
We drove a few blocks. My lower lip quivered, but I didn’t cry.
My mom sighed softly. “Let the adventure begin,” she said.
21
If you ever have to live in your car, you are going to have some problems with feet. Especially if you’re stuck in there with your little sister and your mom and your dad and your puppy and your imaginary friend.
There are many kinds of feet problems.
Stinky dad feet.
The Magic Marker smell of nail polish on your mom’s toes because she says she still wants to look nice so please just deal with it.
Sister feet kicking you just as you’re falling asleep.
The scratchy surprise of dog feet trying to wake you up.
Imaginary friend feet tiptoeing on your head.
I thought hard about the feet problem. Finally I came up with a plan. What’s the worst that can happen, is how I figured it.
What I did is I took a cardboard TV box we found behind Wal-Mart. I smushed it flat. I drew on the outside of the box and the inside too. I only had three markers and one dried out when the cap fell under the backseat. So it was mostly just red dogs with blue eyes. And blue cats with red eyes.
I put stars on the inside. They seemed like a good thing to think about before you went to sleep.
I wrote kep out jacksons rum on the top. Mom said, too bad we had to leave our dictionary behind. Dad said, if only it really was rum.
Every night I opened up my box and slipped my sleeping bag inside it. When I crawled inside, I felt like a caterpillar in a cocoon. It was almost like my old room, where I could think without anyone bugging me.
When Robin kicked me in her sleep, she hit the box. Which was not exactly the same as kicking me.
Unfortunately, Aretha liked to sleep with me. So it could get a little dog-breath-y.
Also, the box didn’t help much with the stinky dad feet.
I knew we were lucky because we had our old Honda minivan, which had lots of room. I met a kid who lived for a whole year in one of those VW cars. It was red and round like a ladybug and just about as tiny. The poor kid had to sleep sitting up, squished between his two little sist
ers.
Another reason we were lucky was because my sleeping box was just decoration. Some people actually live in boxes on the street.
I wasn’t looking on the bright side. It’s better to have a big car than a little one when you are living in it. And it’s better to have a box in a car than a box on a street.
Those were just facts.
I wasn’t like my dad, who kept saying we weren’t homeless.
We were just car camping.
22
I didn’t think much about the cat tail–windshield wiper for a while. Things were so weird I guess I didn’t want to add any extra weirdness.
Our first night in the minivan was kind of fun. We drove to a park near the Golden Gate Bridge. A man had a telescope to look at the sky, and he showed us the Big Dipper and Orion. Across the water, the lights of San Francisco covered the ground like lazy stars.
We were going to just sleep in the parking lot. But a security guy knocked on the window. He told us we had to get moving, and then he waved his flashlight around like a Star Wars lightsaber.
We drove to Denny’s, a restaurant that’s open 24 hours. My mom knew one of the cooks, and he asked the manager if we could park there for just one night. He said yes and even let us have some pancakes that were too burnt for the customers.
We had more burnt pancakes in the morning. By then everybody was grumpy and sore. Only Aretha was in a good mood. She loves pancakes.
My parents didn’t have any work scheduled that day, so we headed to the public library to kill time and wash up. My mom and dad took turns staying outside with Aretha. It’s dangerous to leave a dog in a hot car.
The library had air-conditioning and soft chairs. The bathrooms were clean, which was a nice plus.
I never used to think about things like is a bathroom clean or not. Whenever I took a bath, my mom would say, “Here comes Hurricane Jackson,” because I made such a mess.
One of my favorite bath experiments is about something scientists call buoyancy. Will It Float? is what I call it. It can get a little messy but it’s very interesting. For example, if you drop a mostly full bottle of ketchup in the tub, it will not float. But it will turn the water an awesome color.
It will also annoy your mom.
We stayed at the library most of the day. The librarian in the children’s department even shared her sandwich with Robin and me. She had Ritz crackers, too, and she gave all of those to Robin.
After that, Robin decided she was going to be a librarian when she grew up. If the animal scientist thing doesn’t work out, I might become a librarian too.
23
We’d only been living in our van for four days when somebody stole my mom’s purse, which had most of our money in it because my dad’s wallet was falling apart.
After we told a policeman, he wanted to know our address so if they found the money they could give it back.
We are between addresses is what my mom told him.
“Ah,” said the policeman. He nodded like he’d figured out a hard math problem.
My parents and the policeman talked for a while. He gave them the address of two homeless shelters where people can sleep at night. The dads go to one place and the moms and kids go to another, he explained.
“No way,” said my dad. “Not happening.”
Robin said, “We are car camping.”
The policeman looked at Aretha, who was licking his shiny black shoe.
He said that no animals were allowed at either shelter.
I asked if that included puppies.
“Sadly,” he said.
I told him my teacher Mr. Vandermeer had pet rats.
“Rats are especially not allowed,” said the policeman.
There are good rats and bad rats, I told him. I said white rats like the ones my teacher had, Harry and Hermione, were very clean animals. But wild rats could make you sick.
Then I told the policeman how Mr. Vandermeer was teaching his rats to play basketball with a teeny ball for a science experiment. Rats are amazingly intelligent.
“Basketball,” the policeman repeated. He looked at my parents like maybe they should be worried about me. Then he gave my mom a little white card with phone numbers on it.
“Social services, shelters, food pantry, free clinic,” he said. “Check back with us about the theft. Meantime, hang in there, folks.”
We were almost to the car when I heard the policeman call, “Hey, Ratman!”
I turned around. He waved me back. When I got there he said, “How’s their jump shot? The rats, I mean?”
“Not so good,” I said. “But they’re kind of learning. They get treats when they do something right. It’s called ‘posi—’” I couldn’t remember. It was two long words.
“Positive reinforcement?”
“Yep!”
“Yeah, I could use some of that myself,” said the policeman.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. “Give this to your dad,” he said. “But wait until you’re in the car.”
I asked how come I had to wait.
“Because otherwise he’ll give it right back to me,” the policeman said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I know,” he said.
When I was inside the car, I gave the money to my dad. He looked like he was going to throw it out the window.
I thought maybe he was going to yell at me, but he didn’t. He just tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Finally he shoved the bill in his jeans pocket.
“Looks like dinner’s on me,” he said softly.
24
The next day, we dropped my mom at her part-time waitress job. Before she got out of the car, she looked at my dad and said, “We have to apply for assistance, Tom.”
“We’ll be back on our feet before they deal with all the paperwork,” he said.
“Still.”
“Plus we probably make too much money to qualify for help.”
“Still.”
They looked at each other for a few long seconds. Finally my dad nodded.
We went to an office called Social Services to find out about help. My dad filled out lots of forms while Robin and I sat on hard orange chairs. Then we went to three hardware stores, where my dad put in applications for work. My dad grumbled about all the gas we used up. To cheer him up, I said maybe we could feed the car water instead. He laughed a little then.
“Not having enough work is tough work,” my dad told my mom when she joined us in the car after her shift. He took a deep breath and blew it out hard, like he was facing a birthday cake with too many candles.
“Dad?” I said. “I’m kind of hungry.”
“Me too, buddy,” he said. “Me too.”
“Almost forgot,” my mom said, reaching into her tote bag. “I grabbed some of the bagels that the chef was about to throw out.” She pulled out a white paper sack. “They’re pretty stale, though. And they’re pumpernickel.”
“Well, that’s a start,” said my dad. He stared out the window. After a moment, he clapped his hands. “Okay. Let’s get this show on the road. Guess I can’t stall any longer.”
My mom touched his shoulder. “Are you sure about this, Tom?” she asked. “I get my paycheck tomorrow. We could go to the food pantry. Or the shelter.”
“Nope. I got this.” He smiled, but it didn’t look like a real smile to me. “I’d rather do a little performing than stand in another endless line at some office, waiting for a handout.”
We drove to the back of the restaurant. My dad found a nice clean box in the Dumpster.
“Are you making the begging sign?” I asked him. He’d been talking about it off and on with my mom since our money was stolen.
“Given that I’ll be singing for our supper,” he said as he tore the box into pieces, “I prefer to call it a request for gratuities.”
“What’s a gratuity?” I asked.
“A tip. Money yo
u give someone like a waiter,” my mom said. “When we were young, your dad and I used to be street performers, before we had regular gigs. Lots of musicians do it.”
“I’ve got this down to a science,” said my dad. “First off, you need a cardboard sign. Then you need a busy intersection. The best corners have long stoplights.”
“It might not hurt to take Aretha,” my mom said.
“People love dogs,” I told my dad. “I bet you’ll make a lot more money with a dog.”
“Can I borrow a marker, Jackson?” my dad asked.
I handed him my blue marker. “That guy on the corner by Target? He has a puppy.”
My dad studied a cardboard rectangle. “No prop puppies.”
“Write ‘God Bless,’ at least,” said my mom. “Everybody writes ‘God Bless.’”
“Nope. As it happens, I have no idea what God is up to.”
My mom sighed.
My dad scribbled something on the cardboard, like he was in a hurry to be somewhere else. He held up the sign and asked what we thought.
I didn’t answer right away. In second grade, my dad got a D in penmanship, which is how you make your letters. He did not improve with age.
“What’s it say?” I asked.
“‘THANK YOU.’”
“Looks a lot like ‘THINK YOU.’”
He shrugged. “Even better.”
25
We drove to a busy corner and parked next to a Starbucks. It was a cool-and-rainy kind of day.
“Are you sure about this?” my mom asked. “Let me join you.”
“Won’t be the first time I’ve played an outdoor concert,” my dad said. “And you can’t come with me. Someone needs to stay with the kids.”
We waited in the minivan, watching him as he crossed the street. He had his sign and his guitar, but no Aretha.
My dad stood on the lane divider by the left-hand turn signal. He propped his THANK YOU sign against his open guitar case. We couldn’t hear him singing. There was too much traffic.
“He needs to make eye contact,” my mom said.
The light turned red and a line of cars formed next to my dad. Someone beeped his horn, and my dad looked over. A driver in a taxi passed him some money.