die. More importantly, God wouldn't have let her mother die of breast cancer last year.
No. Natasha didn't believe in God and she'd continue to deny His existence until He gave her mother back and admitted that it had all been one big, tremendously cruel joke.
Until then, she had to leave all of her friends and travel, hat in hand, to a place she'd never heard of and meet people she'd never met so that she and her family could actually afford to eat and have a home. It was hard for her not to feel as if her life had been ripped off.
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself," Aunt Lin said from the middle seat. She sat wedged against the passenger side door, rope and bungee cords controlling an impending avalanche of suitcases and a giant bag of cheese balls that Derrick had begged her dad to buy at a truck stop in the middle of New Mexico. "It makes you look ugly and your mother never wanted you to be ugly."
At the mention of her mother, Natasha closed her eyes.
Aunt Lin wasn't really their aunt. She'd been her mother's Chinese nanny when she was little, had stayed after she got married, and become nanny to both Derrick and Natasha.
Derrick mimicked Auntie Lin's accent in a bad parody of a Charlie Chan movie. "Yes Auntie. Natasha no rike ugry ."
Natasha flipped him off, then quickly hid her finger in her other hand. Thankfully her father hadn't seen, couldn't see, what she'd done. He hated "the bird" and would punish her if he'd seen her do it. She sighed, and let the weight of her woes bring her down.
Her father said that they were going to live in a resort, or what used to be a resort. Natasha supposed that something had happened for the place to lose its status. Whatever the case, Bombay Beach was in California. And it was a beach. And there was water. This was her mantra whenever thoughts about Willow Grove and her previously-perfect-then-turned-to-shit life intruded upon the reality of the Rolling Avocado and a life with no mother.
California .
Beach.
Water.
The sun was setting as she stared out the window at the scenery rolling away behind them. Where Eastern Pennsylvania was filled with lush trees, grasses and bushes, the desert of Western Arizona was empty except for the occasional cactus. Some were multi-armed giants, some small and white-furred. She didn't know what any of them were called, but they all looked alien and deadly.
One of the things she liked to do in the woods by herself was track down sassafras trees. Usually only tiny saplings, no bigger around than her thumb, they stood only a few feet high. Their three-pronged leaves let off a citrus smell, reminiscent of lime when squeezed. Sometimes she'd pull them out of the ground so she could get to their roots, which had been used for tea or as a sweetener by the Native Americans long ago. Once she'd been brave enough to wash the root free of dirt, and then sucked on it for several hours. The taste had been pleasant, like gum but without the necessity of chewing. Even so, she'd probably looked ridiculous, like some wild frontier woman.
But like everything else in her life, those days were gone.
The old Natasha would have found the cacti intriguing. She would have wanted to know everything about them. She would have wanted to touch them, maybe even smell their bark. Now all she thought about was how ugly and disconcerting they were. The best she could do was squint her eyes and imagine them as people standing beside the road and waving at them. As if they were herding the Rolling Avocado and the people within it along to a certain destiny.
She wondered what her father was thinking about this whole change of life. She'd never really met her grandfather. He'd left her dad when he was very young, and never returned. There had always been a vacuum in her life when talking about grandparents. Everyone else seemed to have two sets of them, but Natasha only had one set - her mother's parents - who they'd left in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Grandpa Lazlo had