Dandelions don't need a garden.
They choose where they bloom.
— Nobody's Jo
I was born twenty-five years ago, in a bathtub, in Wanatah, Indiana. My mother couldn't afford to go to a hospital, so she showed up at a doctor's house and said she needed to use the bathroom. In her defense, she didn't say she needed a toilet.
That's where I grew up. In Wanatah, I mean. Not in a doctor's bathroom.
Might as well teach you how to say it before we get too far into this. Wanatah is pronounced kind of like Omaha, with a T. Omaha. Wanatah.
It doesn't matter. You'll never go there.
Wanatah is just close enough to Gary, Indiana, to make a kid think Gary was Big Time, as if it was something to aspire to.
To put that in perspective, Gary once had over 170,000 people. Today, it's less than 70,000. You know you're nowhere when the closest somewhere is dying.
Wanatah isn't dying. It isn't growing either. It just exists. It's the kind of place that only exists because it's already there.
The people are nice enough. Some of them, anyway. But like the town itself, they just exist. Tom's at the shop. Same as yesterday. John's pretending to be sober. He'll do the same tomorrow. Tessa's knocked up again. Her dad fell down again. That's John. Folks shop on Saturdays. On Sundays, most go to church so they can pretend to believe in something, because everybody needs something, and there's nothing in Wanatah.
People from there were born. They will live and they will die. They exist, but not much more.
My family, however, does not exist.
My father split the moment he heard the word pregnant. Mom never told me who he was, and I never asked because what's the point? Even in a town of less than a thousand, there's still plenty of people to hate. Why add a stranger to the list?
Mom once told me I look like my father. She meant it as a compliment, but it made no sense. I'm short and plump, with unruly mud-brown hair and Get Out Of The Bedroom eyes. Why did Mom fuck somebody who looks like that? Surely, the answer was money. The less somebody has, the worse things they'll do to get it.
Mom had me when she was a teenager. By the time I was a teenager, I might as well have been raising her. But we got by. I knew when to give her space. She knew when I needed mine. I was strong and independent. She was fragile and needy, but she needed me, which felt like... something. And she cackled when she laughed, which meant it was a good day. On a bad day, she'd get quiet, and the air around her would become thick and heavy, like fog made of cement.
Mom was a mess but it wasn't her fault. I'm told, mental illness runs in the family, but she was the only family I had, so... I don't know. Maybe.
She meant well, but she was often not well.
During a brief stay at church day care when I was eight, I asked a kid named Kyle if his mom locked herself in her bedroom for days at a time too, like mine.
"Do all moms do that?"
He said, "My mom says your mom is crazy."
My fist said his nose was gonna bleed.
I didn't like being sent to church day care anyway. After that, I stayed with the neighbors. And then somebody from school. And then Mom was "Mom" again. At least, for a while.
Even when she was "Mom," she wasn't really a mom. We were more like roommates. She had various jobs. For a while, she was a maid. There were various men. On and off, some of them paid. Occasionally, she had hobbies. None of them lasted, and I rarely kept track.
I think it's fair to say, she did the best she could when she was able. You can't fault somebody for not having abilities they don't have. Well, maybe you can, but you shouldn't.
She tried.
One year, for my birthday, Mom brought home a cake. The icing was smudged in a sad attempt to scrape off most of somebody else's name. That meant she stole it.
"Happy Birthday Je."
She hoped I'd think it said Jo, with a curl on the O.
Clearly, it did not.
And besides, Mom never called me Jo.
Nobody called me Jo. To her and everybody else in Wanatah, I was Dandy.
Dandy is short for Dandelion, which believe it or not, is my middle name. Jonatha Dandelion Bowman. Don't judge. I didn't choose it.
Fun fact: Dandelions can predict the weather. They close up when a storm is coming. I could usually predict when Mom had a storm coming. She'd get mad, but not mad at anything in particular. Then she'd go away for a while. Sometimes to her room. Other times, elsewhere, though I rarely knew where. When the storm passed, she'd be back.
Something else about Dandelions. They're tougher than people think. A dandelion can regrow from just a tiny piece of root. That's why they're hard to kill.
Mom was easy to kill.
She handled that herself.
I was working at The Brass Buckle when it happened. That's a bar on Main Street. Pretty much everything in Wanatah is on Main Street. The Buckle, Wana Pizza, The Other Place.
I was at The Buckle, waiting tables. Bussing tables, technically, because I was only seventeen.
All of a sudden, everything got weird.
The world's worst AC/DC cover band was on stage, part of which was propped up on milk crates. It's that kind of place. Four old white trash drunks were doing an unbelievably awful version of Bad Boy Boogie in front of maybe ten people at most, and that's including Billy, the bartender.
Then, for no apparent reason, they stopped.
The whole place got quiet but the microphones were on, so the quiet got amplified.
The echoes of silence were disturbed by a ringing phone, and then a murmur as it went around the bar.
Somebody mumbled something to somebody, who whispered it to somebody else, but the only word I caught was pills.
One by one, everybody started looking at me, like I knew something they didn't. But it was the other way around.
I said, "What the FUCK, Billy?" but he just stood there, slack-jawed, like he was waiting for somebody to tell him what to do. Technically, he was my boss, but nobody's my boss. I know you know what I mean.
The silence got loud as every head in the bar turned from me to Billy, then back to me, as Billy just stood there, holding the phone. Just... holding it. And he couldn't look at me at all.
When he finally did speak, all he could say was, "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
The silence in the bar got louder.
"It's Lila," he said.
"On the phone?"
"No."
And then, I knew.
He eventually managed to say the rest, but he didn't have to. I don't know how, but I knew.
Lila was my mom.
She was dead.
I saw her leave two days before in a brewing storm of her own making, but that was nothing new, so I thought nothing of it.
I figured she needed space. As she left, I thought, "When she's better, she'll be back."
I was wrong.
That's the thing about demons. Everybody's got 'em. Some more than others. But for every man, every woman, and every child, it's a fight they have to face on their own, in the darkness of their own mind.
That night, Mom's demons won.
Don't know why. Doesn't matter why.
"She passed in her sleep," Billy said. "It would have been painless." As if he knew a goddamn thing about pain.
Real pain.
"Dandy, is your... uncle... around? Do you have someplace to stay?"
I told him I'd be fine. The sad thing is, it was true.
The band tried to start up again, but when the drummer's latest fling realized they were playing Highway To Hell, she put a stop to it.
"Oh, fer fuck sake, Carl!"