Dandelions don't need a garden.
They choose where they bloom.
— Nobody's Jo
I was born in Tonawa, 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 Tonawa. Not in a doctor's bathroom.
Might as well teach you how to say it before we get too far into this. Tonawa is pronounced like "Ton of what?" minus the second T, and stated as a fact, not a question.
Ton of wha.
Tonawa.
It doesn't matter. You'll never go there.
Tonawa is in Northwest Indiana. It's surrounded by farmland. The nearest city you might have heard of is Gary, forty miles 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.
Tonawa 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 Tonawa.
People in that town exist, but not much more.
My family, however, does not exist.
My father split the moment he heard the word pregnant. Mom didn't tell me who he was, and I didn't care because what's the point? Even in a tiny town, 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 in Tennessee, shacking up with a freelance debt collector. And if you're thinking, "That's not a thing!" ...you're right. She was a vulture. He was a scammer. Turds of the nether schlock 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 was my mom and her mom. I look nothing like either of them.
Mom told me I look like my father. I think she meant it as a compliment, but it made no sense. I'm short and plump, with messy mud-brown hair and eyes that say you don't scare me, no matter who you are. Why'd 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 was young when she had me. Really young. By the time I was a teenager, I might as well have been raising her. We fought the way girls do, and neither of us wanted the responsibility of being a parent for 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 barely breathable.
Mom was a mess, but it wasn't her fault. In fourth grade, one of my teachers said mental illness tends to run in families, which was a pretty fucking rude thing to say, but Mom was the only family I had, so... I don't know.
Mom meant well, but she was often not well.
During a brief stay at 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.
"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 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, but we were all we had.
Mom had various jobs. Sometimes, she was a maid. And there were various men. Sometimes, some of them paid. Now and then, Mom 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.
When she could, 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 Tonawa, 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 you 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 made sure.
I was working at The Brass Buckle when it happened. That's a bar on Main Street. Pretty much everything in Tonawa is on Main Street. The Buckle. Tona Pizza. The Post Office and Lou's.
It was after midnight. The world's worst AC/DC cover band was performing, 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, and everything got weird. The whole place got quiet but the microphones were on, so the quiet got amplified.
Then a phone rang. Another buzzed, 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 "truck."
One by one, they all 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, and he didn't know by who.
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 said 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.
I underestimated the determination of Mom's demons.
Everybody's got demons. Even you. And when you fight 'em, you're gonna have to do it alone, in the darkness of your own mind.
That night, Mom's demons won.
Don't know why. Doesn't matter why.
"She was in La Porte," Billy said. "By the Pines Motel. They're saying she walked onto the highway and just... laid down. She got hit by a semi." He 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.
Then the band tried to start playing again, but the drummer's latest fling put a stop to it when she realized they were doing Highway to Hell.
"Oh, fer fuck sake, Carl!"