I shrug.
“The watch must have been messed up,” I explain, trying for laid-back, hoping she’ll buy it even though it means I’ll have to run the stupid thing again next week.
“Yes,” she says, nodding distractedly. “I must have started it wrong.”
That night when Mom gets home she finds me slouched on the couch watching reruns of
“That bad, huh?”
“It’s my fallback when I can’t find
She pulls a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby out of a paper sack. Like she read my mind.
“You’re a goddess,” I say.
“Not quite.”
She holds up a book:
“Maybe my tree’s not in North America.”
“Let’s just start with this.”
We take the book to the kitchen table and bend over it together, searching for the exact type of pine tree from my vision. To someone on the outside we’d look like nothing more than a mother helping her daughter with her homework, not a pair of part-angels researching a mission from heaven.
“That’s it,” I say at last, pointing to a picture in the book and then rocking back in my chair, feeling pretty pleased with myself. “The lodgepole pine.”
“Twisted yellowish needles found in pairs,” Mom reads from the book. “Brown, egg-shaped cone?”
“I didn’t get a close look at the pinecones, Mom. It’s just the right shape, with the branches starting partway up the trunk like that, and it feels right,” I answer around a spoonful of ice cream.
“Okay.” She consults the book again. “It looks like the lodgepole pine is found exclusively in the Rocky Mountains and the northwestern coast of the U.S. and Canada. The Native Americans liked to use the trunks for the main supports in their wigwams. Hence the name
“This is
“Good. So we know roughly where this will happen,” says Mom. “Now all we have to do is narrow it down.”
“And then what?” I examine the picture of the pine tree, suddenly imagining the branches in flames.
“Then we’ll move.”
“Move? As in leave California?”
“Yes,” she says. Apparently she’s serious.
“But—” I sputter. “What about school? What about my friends? What about your job?”
“You’ll go to a new school, I imagine, and make new friends. I’ll get a new job, or find a way to do my job from home.”
“What about Jeffrey?”
She gives a little laugh and pats my hand like it’s a silly question. “Jeffrey will come, too.”
“Oh yeah, he’ll love that,” I say, thinking about Jeffrey with his army of friends and his never-ending parade of baseball games, wrestling matches, football practices, and everything else. We have lives, Jeffrey and I. For the first time it occurs to me that I’m in for so much more than I’ve anticipated. My purpose is going to change everything.
Mom closes the book about trees and meets my eyes solemnly across the kitchen table.
“This is the big stuff, Clara,” she says. “This vision, this purpose — it’s why you’re here.”
“I know. I just didn’t think we’d have to move.”
I look out the window into the yard I’ve grown up playing in, my old swing set that Mom has never gotten around to taking down, the row of rosebushes against the back fence that have been there for as long as I can remember. Behind the fence I can barely make out the hazy outline of the distant mountains that have always been the edges of my world. I can hear the Caltrain rumble as it crosses Shoreline Boulevard, and, if I concentrate hard enough, the faint music from Great America two miles away. It seems impossible that we would ever leave this place.
A corner of Mom’s mouth quirks up into a sympathetic smile.
“You thought you could just fly in somewhere for the weekend, complete your purpose, and fly back?”
“Yeah, maybe.” I glance away sheepishly. “When are you going to tell Jeffrey?”
“I think that should wait until we know where we’re going.”
“Can I be there when you tell him? I’ll bring popcorn.”
“Jeffrey’s turn will come,” she says, a muted sadness coming up in her eyes, that look she gets when she thinks we’re growing up too fast. “When he receives his purpose you’ll have to deal with that too.”
“And then we’ll move again?”
