"Martha Soukup - Over the Long Haul" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soukup Martha)

Over the Long Haul
•••
Martha Soukup




Sometimes I think I’ve been in this truck forever, but of course that’s
not so. I just have to look at my license card if I want the proof:
“Shawana Mooney,” it says, and right next to that the day I got the card,
two years ago. Two weeks after little Cilehe was born, which makes it easy
to remember her birthday.
That name “Shawana” makes me think sometimes my daddy was a guy
named Shawn Parker. My mama sure cried when he got shot dead when I
was eight, but she wouldn’t say he was my daddy. She just said he was no
good and ran drugs and then she cried some more. Mooney, of course,
that’s my mama’s name and her mama’s, and it was my great-grandma’s
too. Also my great-grandpa’s. They were married.
Then the card’s got my picture, which looks terrible with my eyes all
stary the way the camera caught them, but I kind of like the way I had my
hair done then, with all those little braids my grandma put in.
I must look awful now. I look at myself in the big side mirror when I fix
up my makeup, but I don’t really look hard at the whole effect, if you know
what I mean. When Tomi gets a little bigger— he’s barely four
now—maybe I can teach him to fix my hair.
Or maybe we’ll get out of this truck.
I think about that a lot, especially when Cilehe gets cranky and yells.
Which isn’t fair to her of course because what two-year-old wants to grow
up in the cab of a truck, six feet wide and six feet deep? Sure, she’s got
“Sesame Street” like I did—and a lot of other much more boring TV, like it
or not—but I could go outside besides, even if my grandma was always
warning me about gangs. Cilehe’s the kind of baby who needs to move
around and tire herself out, which is pretty hard here.
 I know exactly how she feels.
But it’s none of her doing. I tell myself that. I got her by my own
self—well, I had help, but it isn’t her fault her daddy isn’t in a truck too.
They put the welfare parents who actually are raising the kids in the
trucks. Now, do you know any guy who’s going to take them? Nope. Both
their daddies were long gone before that happened.
One truck stop looks a lot like another. I was kind of dozing behind the
wheel when it took a big pull right and the truck went on to an exit. I tried
to guess where we were—I thought maybe Nebraska. Sure was flat as hell
out there.
Cilehe started kicking up a fit. She always acts like the last couple
minutes before we stop is a couple of hours, and screaming will make the
truck go faster. The only thing that could make the truck go faster is if I
hit MANUAL OVERRIDE and drove it myself, and I’d better have a damn
good reason for that or it’s big trouble. She was screaming for the potty.
She just started with that, and she doesn’t like the portapotty in the cab.
Me neither. I don’t care what they say, the thing smells.