Chapter 7: The World

I raced home filled with excitement and glee. I was being offered the best opportunity that I could have ever dreamed of. I was going to travel and meet new people. I was going to put my degree to use and establish a foundation for the rest of my career. I was going to get so much money and give so much to Mama to repay her for raising me all by herself and working herself to death my whole life.

Mama was not as happy.

Dr. Marlar said that Mr. Donnelley wanted me to come as soon as possible, and, given that I had nothing to wait for, I decided to leave on Sunday, two days after I was given the offer. The Donnelley's had offered a plane, but I had never flown before and was not at that level of adventurous yet to get on a plane. They were sending a chauffeur immediately who would arrive at ten in the morning that Sunday.

Two days of being berated had me itching to leave.

"You can't even go to church today?" Mama scoffed as she stood in the doorway of my room. I was packing way more than I had packed to leave for college. "When's the last time you went to church, huh?"

"The dorm held devotionals on Sundays, Mama, you know that," I murmured, agitation raising my blood pressure. Ever since I came home and instantly told Mama the news, she had been treating me like a delinquent and barely speaking to me. When she did speak to me, all she said was that this was crazy and dangerous.

"Damnit, Becky, you don't even know these people. What if they're crazy? What if they're in a cult? God knows what goes on over there."

Biting my lip, I pushed past her to go into the bathroom and grab my toothbrush. She scoffed at me again, and I thought to myself that if she were to scoff anymore, she would simply run out of air.

"California ain't like here, Becky. It's full of hippies and weirdos. Is that what this is? You want to be a hippie?"

"Stop it," I snapped as I passed her to come back into my room. Shoving my toothbrush into my bag, I tried to zip it closed, but it was packed so full it wouldn't zip shut. I tugged at the zipper as my anger started to consume me. "I thought you'd be happy for me. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and all you're doing is being negative."

"I'm being negative? Really, Becky? I'm being negative because I don't want you to move across the country and be gone for four months doing God knows what?"

"French!" I screamed, and with a forceful tug on the zipper with a strength I didn't know I had, the zipper ripped completely off the bag. The detached zipper in my hand, I turned to Mama who was looking at me in shock. Never had I raised my voice at her, ever. "I'm teaching French to kids, Mama! That's what I'm gonna be doing! And I'm gonna make a hell of a lot of money doing that!"

"Money," she echoed. "So it's about money. You know what happens to people who let money control their life?"

"Oh, God," I sobbed, tossing the zipper to the ground and moving to my other bag. "I'm so fed up with your paranoias. Everything is a threat, everything is a problem, everything is dangerous or crazy. You act like if I cross the street, I'll surely get hit by a car."

"You're naïve," she mumbled, placing her hand over her mouth. "I thought you were a lot smarter than this."

I ignored her, packing up my other bags before sitting on my bed to put my shoes on. There were so many things on my mind. I had been so excited to come home and see Mama before I left, but now I couldn't get out of that house soon enough. She had changed since I'd moved out. She'd become even more anxious, even more paranoid. I wasn't around to tempt her anxieties, and she had shut herself off from everything even more.

"Remember what I told you about the world?" she said more solemnly, and I looked up at her as I tied my shoes. Her face was red now, and so were her eyes. "I thought you had listened to me. Now here you are, letting the world take you away—take you away from me."

She turned away, covering her eyes with her hand. Sighing, I stood up from my bed. Although Mama had been unreasonably angry with me, I couldn't help but feel guilt pull at my heart. Mama was scared of everything because everything had taken from her. The war took her husband. Bills took her money. Now I was being taken from her. The last time a loved one left her for what was supposed to be only a few months, they never came back.

"Mama, I have to do this. This will teach me so much more than a job at the elementary school will teach me. I've been so... still... my entire life. Out of all the people who are chosen for these kinds of things, it was never supposed to be me. I would be forsaking so much to turn it down."

She didn't say anything. She didn't even look at me. There was a honk outside, and I glanced out of the window to see a shiny black car pulling in front of the house. The time was here.

I found myself looking at the four walls of my room again, and my heart was tugging hard in my chest. I looked at Mama, but she was still turned away from me. I picked up my bags and walked past her, going to the front door and opening it. I could hear her following behind me, and right before I stepped onto the porch, I turned around to look at her.

It was like when I left for college. I remember how she held my face, how she was crying. She was crying again, but she was standing away from me. Her tears were angry.

"You're gonna see the world. It's gonna eat you up and spit you right out. You're not strong enough for that, Becky. You're gonna come running home to me, crying like a child. But I won't catch you."

Her voice had never been so low and steady. Mama had never looked at me with so much hatred. Her fear was controlling her, and she was spiteful because of it. I could feel my lip quivering.

"I won't be here for you when that happens. But I hope you remember that you chose this. You chose the world. You chose it over your daddy, over Greg, and over me. And that will be your greatest sin."

My heart sunk low into my stomach. I wanted her to take it all back, to say goodbye to me, to hug me, to love me again. Tears blurred my vision of her, and it was a sort of relief to not see the disgust in her eyes.

"Goodbye, Mama."

I left and closed the door behind me. I waited for a moment, expecting her to open it and grab me and hug me, to say she was sorry for saying that, to say that everything would be okay. She didn't. I looked up and saw a man dressed in a black suit standing in front of the car. Sheepishly, I wiped all the tears from my eyes and face.

"Miss Hayes?" the man said, giving me a kind smile. I knew that he could see how red my face was and the glimmer of tears on my cheeks as I stepped off the porch and into the sun. "I'm Neil, personal chauffer for the Donnelley's." As I walked to him, he held out his hand, and I took it. He was an older man, his hat covering the grey twirls of hair on his head. His hand shook mine very gently, as if I were made of porcelain. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"It's nice to meet you, too," I said quietly, giving a teary smile.

"Let me take those for you," he said, and I handed him my bags. He put them in the trunk of the car, and then he hurried back and opened the door to the backseat, gesturing for me to get in.

"Thank you," I said, trying to be as graceful as possible as I slid into the expensive-looking car.

Neil got in the driver's seat and started the car. "Are you ready to go, Miss Hayes? It's going to be a long ride."

"Yes, I am," I said, looking at him in the rearview mirror. He nodded and gave a wink before pulling onto the road.

I tried to stop myself, but I couldn't help it. I sat up and slowly turned to glance through the back window. I remembered doing the same thing when the taxi took me away to college. I remembered seeing Mama standing on the porch in her pink polka-dotted dress, crying and watching me until she couldn't see the taxi anymore.

She wasn't there.

"Do you mind if I turn on the radio, Miss Hayes? It helps make the drive go by faster," Neil asked me from the front seat.

I turned back around, wiping the last tear that fell from my eye. "No, I don't mind. And you can just call me Becca."

He winked at me again from the mirror. "Alright, Miss Becca."

He reached to the middle dash of the car, which had a radio I had never seen before. He turned the knob, and some music started to play. It was a relief to hear the music.

We drove out of New Orleans, and I noticed the Prytania theatre as we passed. It made me think of Greg, so I reached into my purse and scrummaged around until I found the little picture of Greg and I that I had kept with me all through college. I decided to keep it in my hands during the drive, and it made me feel as if Greg were with me in that back seat.

I had never been in a car for so long, and by the time we made it to the deserts of Amarillo, I was exhausted. While we still had daylight, I tried to memorize everything I saw through the window. It was mostly road and other cars with a few landmarks here and there, but now it was midnight, and all I could see were windmills turning in the night sky.

Neil pulled us into a hotel and got us two rooms, and I slept harder than I ever had in my life. I was dreading getting back in the car again, but I was feeling a little numb. I was farther from home than I had ever been, and I felt like all my senses were turned upside down. We started off again early in the morning before the sun rose, and I found that Neil was quite the talker. He asked me all about my life, though there wasn't much to tell, and he said that he had been a driver for the Donnelley's for his entire adulthood, even back when they still lived in Louisiana. He said it was always nice seeing a fellow New Orleans citizen after living on the West Coast for so long.

After seeing the spectacles of Santa Fe deserts and the Rocky mountains in Arizona, we made it into California. I had seen the entirety of Route 66, and I thought there couldn't be much more to see until Neil started driving through a neighborhood with the biggest houses I had ever seen.

Something in my chest tightened when he took a turn on a hill and drove the car through an open gate with gold letters written on it: Donnelley Estate.