Dandelions don't need a garden.
They choose where they bloom.
— Nobody's Jo
I was born in Tonawka, Indiana, on April 29th, 2000.
In a bathtub.
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 Tonawka, I mean. Not in a doctor's bathroom.
Tonawka is the Native American word for "Get the fuck off our land." Apparently, the town's founders thought, "Hey, let's name the place after that thing they were screaming at us as we shot them. That word was cool. I wonder what it means."
Might as well teach you how to say it before we get too far into this. Tonawka is pronounced like a Ton of Naw, with a Ka at the end.
TonNAWka.
Get it?
It doesn't matter. You'll never go there.
Tonawka is in northwest Indiana, surrounded by farmland. The nearest city you might have heard of is Gary, forty minutes away.
The population of Gary was once over 170,000. Today, it's less than 70,000. You know you're nowhere when the closest somewhere is dying.
Tonawka isn't dying. It isn't growing either. It's just there. It's the kind of place that only exists because it already exists.
Around a thousand people live there. Most of 'em are like extras in a movie without a plot. 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 Tonawka.
People in that town 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?
When my grandmother heard the word pregnant, she threw Mom out. I met the lady once. She came around to see if we had any money, as if that was even possible. Mom called her a bitch. She responded by saying I was fat. So that went well. Never saw her again. Last I heard, she was shacking up with some guy in Tennessee who worked as a freelance debt collector. And if you're thinking, "That's not a thing!" ...you're right. Fucking vultures. Birds of a feather scam together.
The funny thing is, my mother was the spitting image of her mother. Picture Wilma Flintstone on meth. Now take away the meth but don't change the look at all. That's Mom and her mom. I look nothing like either of them.
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. We fought the way girls do, and neither one of us wanted to be raising the other. 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. On a good day, she cackled when she laughed. On a bad day, she'd get quiet, and the air around her would become thick and heavy.
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 six, I asked a kid named Kyle if his mom locked herself in her bedroom for days at a time, like mine did.
"Do all moms do that?"
He said, "My mom says your mom is crazy."
My fist said his nose would 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, and for each of us, the other was an unwanted obligation.
Mom 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 Tonawka, I was Dandy.
Dandy is short for Dandelion, which believe it or not, is my middle name. Joanna 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. And 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 Tonawka is on Main Street. The Buckle, Tona Pizza, Mac's.
The world's worst AC/DC cover band was performing that night, which actually means four old white trash drunks were doing an unbelievably awful version of Bad Boy Boogie in front of ten people at most, and that's including me and Billy, the bartender. I was waiting tables. Legally speaking, I was bussing tables, because I was only seventeen.
All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, the band stopped playing.
Everything got weird as everybody started looking around.
The whole place got quiet but the microphones were on, so the quiet was amplified.
A phone buzzed, and then another, and a murmur started working its way 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 turned to look 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 to be told 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 a week 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!"