Free Torch by Cheryl Strayed Page A

disapproved bitterly when she decided to continue with her pregnancy. They said she was going to be the worst kind of mother—a
teen
mom, a
single
mom—but then when she eloped with Karl they’d also disapproved of that, because Karl was a coal miner who’d dragged her off to Pennsylvania to live in a trailer. They disapproved when she left him the first time and the second time and the third and the fourth, because when you get married you stick it out no matter what; but they also disapproved when she went back because how could she continue to be married to such a loser of a man. They disapproved when she left him for real the fifth time and moved across the country to a remote town that didn’t even appear on the map, because how was she going to make it on her own, and then later, they disapproved when she met Bruce and committed herself to what they called a “hippie charade of a marriage.”
    Against this backdrop, she lived her life. She hated her parents at times, loved them at other times. She talked to them each Sunday on the phone and often after they’d hung up she decided to never speak to them again, but then she would call the next Sunday. She was a slave to Sundays.
    How are you? Good. How are you? Good. How are the kids? Great
.
    Her mother would be on one phone, sitting on the aqua bedspread that covered her parents’ king-size bed, her father on the other phone, standing in the dining room with a grandfather clock ticking nearby.
    Several times a year they sent her boxes of things they wanted to get rid of. Things they said they thought she could use. Old towels and impossible kitchen equipment that performed only one simple task: shredding cheese or mashing fruit. Or hideous swaths of fabric that it took Teresa several minutes to figure out were curtains—as opposed to other hideous swaths of fabric that she had first
thought
to be curtains, but turned out to be pants her mother had worn in the seventies. But every once in a while, in the midst of all the crap, there would be a shirt sheloved and wore and wore and wore. Her parents took out life insurance policies on Claire and Joshua, just enough to cover their funerals, but wouldn’t give Teresa a dime. Not at Christmas, not for her birthday. When she’d married Karl they told her that she was an adult now. When she left him, they said she had to weed the garden that she’d planted.
    And she did. She weeded her garden. She had a million jobs. As a waitress, a nurse’s assistant, a factory worker, a janitor. Her million jobs were always doing one of these four things, but the place changed a million times. It turned out that Claire was smart, good in school, good at math and reading, good at tests, her mind like flypaper. She would go to college and be famous somehow. She would be rich and buy her mother a house in Tahiti, they said, without any of them being exactly sure where Tahiti was. She would be the first woman president of the United States.
Imagine that!
They did. She won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota. A full ride and off she went, majoring in political science, in dance, in Spanish, and in English, and then a combination of all four things.
    Joshua was not as much of an overachiever, but kind and goodhearted, hardworking and honest. He’d had some trouble with his ears in first grade—couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying—so they put him in the front row. Teresa took him in for a procedure. Tubes. He was mildly dyslexic, wrote
gotfor
instead of forgot. He liked to imagine things, that they had a swimming pool or a pet giraffe named Jim. He excelled at drawing automobiles meticulously, beautifully in pencil, perfectly to scale. He knew everything about cars and trucks—the models, years, makes. Like Bruce, he was a Chevy man, and everything made by Ford sucked. He could fix cars too. His hands a gentle pair of tools taking things apart, then putting them back together again, better than before.
    One Sunday