Chapter 1 Place When I left Clinton for college at eighteen, I thought I''d never come back. My mom, Kathy, had always lived in terror that her daughters would get stuck in Clinton, so for most of my life, I knew I would leave and stay gone. Fear propelled me outward, dominating my relationship to my hometown as I grew up. When I was twenty-four, in 2004, my dad, Billy, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was given less than two years to live, but he responded well to treatment. Two years later, in the summer of 2006, the cancer had gotten so small that doctors couldn''t detect it on scans. That was what my sister Courtney and I were told. Courtney was living in Denver, and I was in New York.
Then in the fall of 2006, his cancer came back suddenly and fiercely, leading to a two-week hospital stay. My mom didn''t tell us. My dad was released from the hospital, but he was so weak that my mom and her friend had to help him up the stairs. They still didn''t tell Courtney or me how ill he''d become. I was working at The New York Times as a news assistant and had vacation days that I needed to use before the end of the year, so I could have gone home, and if I had, I would have been with them during his last week. Instead, I stayed in New York, having dinners and drinks with friends, spending long days at museums, relaxing. I think about that week a lot, imagining my dad stumbling into his bedroom for the last time. A few days after he came home from the hospital, Daddy was watching the TV show Lost when he called downstairs to my mom and said something weird: "Doesn''t that actress look like her grandfather?" Momma rushed upstairs and found him seizing.
He was rushed to the hospital again, for what proved to be the last time. Finally, Momma called us. By the time Courtney and I flew home, our father was in the Veterans Administration hospital in Little Rock, receiving treatment. Tumors covered his brain, and the doctors said they could do nothing but make him comfortable in his last days. He couldn''t talk to us, just made a whispery whir whir whir sound. We saw in his eyes, though, that he was trying to communicate something. We struggled to decipher it. Was he trying to tell Momma to take care of his dog, Puppy? we asked.
He nodded and sighed with the most relieved look I''ve ever seen. We hugged him, and he combed his fingers through our hair, as he''d done when we were little. He was fifty-five. We''d always known that Daddy, a heavy smoker and drinker, would die young. He''d known it too. Courtney and I stayed as long as we could but then had to return to our respective cities. He died soon afterward, and we flew back to bury him. The last time I''d been inside the town''s United Methodist church, I''d attended someone else''s funeral.
Mourning him in the same place now felt like closing a grim, traumatic loop. I''m not sure I''ve ever forgiven Momma for not telling us before it was too late. "Your daddy didn''t want you girls to know," she said during our first fight about it. "We were afraid you''d quit your jobs and rush home." For years afterward, whenever someone else died, or when Puppy died--which she told me about very casually in a text message--I''d call her up and yell at her, angry and accusatory. I''d ask her again what I''d asked her then--"Why on earth would we have quit our jobs and come back?"--and she''d just say she didn''t know. But her fear was so deep and irrational that she thought we would lose the opportunities that leaving had afforded us simply by coming home. She couldn''t imagine a world in which we had stable lives while also staying connected to our family.
She had actually gotten out once. After high school, she''d lived for a few struggling years in and around Chicago. She had moved back after a personal trauma that she told us about only when we were grown. So our being able to live elsewhere felt momentous to her. It had taken so much effort on her part to ensure that we left, and then she worried that she would ruin it for us, that some family trauma would force us to return, as she had had to return. So she hid the struggles of people in Clinton from us. She was proud that Courtney and I didn''t live in Clinton, but her pride came at a cost: I''d missed that last week with my dad, and I often felt a little unmoored and displaced, as if I had no home at all.