Tessie D

My name is Tessie, and I live in a small town in the middle of Nowhere, Texas, with my mom, my dad, and my younger sister, Annie.

We moved here when I was in the third grade after Daddy retired from the Army.

Momma and Daddy used the money Grandaddy Bud left us to buy 100 acres and a trailer house. (I think some of it was meant for our college education.)

But it’s a pretty nice house, and I have my own room at least.

I’m not sure why we moved here—I’d never even heard of this place before. Daddy’s dad, Grandpa Bruce, lives nearby, so I guess Daddy wanted to be close to family. But I’m not entirely sure why, since Daddy said they didn’t talk much after his parents got divorced, and I’d never even met Grandpa Bruce before we moved here.

Looking back, I don’t remember much about that first summer except that I thought we’d moved to the surface of the sun.

That and Daddy never left the house. I didn’t know then that this was the beginning of something.

Not to find a job, not for anything.

He spent that first summer sitting in his underwear at the dining room table, hunched over an ashtray, his head in his hands, chain-smoking and drinking Lone Star.

That was the summer I first got sick and couldn’t breathe. I coughed so hard I tasted blood. I was lying on the couch watching reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and Laverne & Shirley on Channel 39, and Daddy kept right on smoking at the table behind me.

Before we moved here, Momma didn’t work. But after Daddy didn’t get a job and we started running out of the college-fund money, Momma began working weeknights at a nursing home. It hasn’t been so bad. She leaves for work when we go to sleep and wakes up when we get home from school, and she’s home on the weekends.

That’s all I can write for today. We got new computers at school, but I can only use them during my lunch break.