Tessie D

I guess this would be a good time to introduce myself. My name is Tessie, and I live in a small town in the Middle of Nowhere, Texas, with my mom, dad, and my younger sister, Abigail. 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 town. My daddy’s dad, Grandpa Bruce, lives in a nearby town, so I guess Daddy wanted to be near family. 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 him before we moved here. 

I don’t remember much about that first summer except that I thought we’d moved to the surface of the sun and that Daddy never left the house. Not to find a job, nothing. 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—I coughed so hard that I spit up blood, laying on the couch watching reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and Lavern and Shirley on Channel 39 and Daddy kept right on smoking at the table. 

Before we moved here, Momma didn’t work. But, since Daddy didn’t have a job and we were running out of the college fund money, Momma got a job working weeknights at a nursing home. It hasn’t been so bad—she leaves for work when we go to sleep, and she 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.