I sometimes wonder how different I would be had I spent more time with him than Janean. The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me what little effort he’s made to be a part of my life. My negative feelings toward him come from all the experiences I didn’t have with him. In fact, the times I did spend with my father in the summer are some of my only good childhood memories. I have no negative experiences of him in my memories. I walk lifeless, hopeless, following signs for baggage claim to meet the father I’m half made of, yet somehow wholly unaccustomed to. One dead mother, one layover in Orlando and several hours of weather delays later, I’m here.Īs soon as I step off the plane and into the jet bridge, I can feel the late afternoon heat melting and sizzling my skin like I’m made of butter. I once asked my mother, Janean, why she keeps a picture of Mother Teresa on our living room wall. In a trailer house, the walls crumble beneath your fingernails like chalk if you so much as scratch at them. The walls of a trailer house aren’t made of the same stuff walls in a normal house are made of. There’s a picture of Mother Teresa that hangs on our living room wall where a television would go if we could afford the kind of television that hangs on the wall, or even a home with the kind of walls that could hold a television. After carving her path all on her own, Beyah is well on her way to bigger and better things, thanks to no one but herself.

Heart Bones, Life and a dismal last name are the only two things Beyah Grim’s parents ever gave her.

Colleen hoover bones