“All right,” she assured her quietly. “We’ll talk about it some other time. I’ve got to leave for school now, okay? I’ll be back around eight thirty tonight after work. Please promise you’ll try to eat something else?”

Gillian gave a slight shrug and turned her face into the pillow as she pulled the covers up almost over her head. Tessa sighed, knowing that this was her mother’s way of shutting her off, and that it would do no good to press her further. She gave her another quick kiss on the top of her head before clearing away the dishes, and grabbing her backpack.

The unsettled feeling she’d woken up with didn’t diminish as she made her way down the three flights of rickety stairs to the parking lot. If anything, the butterflies in her tummy were fluttering even harder as she unlocked the cream Toyota compact. Her mother was getting worse as each day passed, and Tessa was becoming more and more despondent as she tried desperately to figure out a way to get Gillian the help she so badly needed.

But it was hard when you were only sixteen, had no relatives or close friends or neighbors to help, and had only lived in this city for a scant six months. They had arrived in Tucson in early April, with barely two months remaining in the school year. Such an impulsive move was nothing new to Tessa, having grown used to switching cities and apartments and schools sometimes two or three times in a year. Gillian was flighty, high strung, given to fits of artistic temperament and spontaneity, and she had often referred to herself as a gypsy at heart, even though she was of Norwegian descent and had grown up in a small town in Minnesota.

The positive side of starting a new school towards the very end of the term – if one could think of it in such a light – was that Tessa had been able to snag a spot at what was considered the best public high school in Tucson. The district had an open enrollment policy, and when presented with the choice between the rather rundown school in her neighborhood, and this much nicer one several miles away, the decision had been a no-brainer. Not only was the school more modern, with better maintained facilities, but was higher ranked academically.

Not that the latter made much of a difference to Tessa. She’d always struggled to keep her grades up, was lucky to get B’s and C’s, and had long ago given up the idea of taking the sort of classes she’d need to get into college. Ever since she’d realized the extent of her mother’s mental illness, she had accepted the fact that getting a decent job after high school to support the two of them had to be her only goal. She took the most basic classes she could at school, ones that she knew she could pass and wouldn’t demand too much of her time with homework assignments or studying. Geometry, unfortunately, had been a graduation requirement at her new school and she was counting the weeks until the dreaded class could be over and done with.

Tessa knew that her scholastic struggles weren’t entirely her fault. She wasn’t dumb or lazy or without ambition. Things just came a little harder for her at times, and it wasn’t like she’d ever been able to get help from Gillian with homework. Her mother, in fact, had more often than not scoffed at the notion of homework and tests and regimented classes, and there had been numerous times when Tessa had been a child when Gillian had called her in sick so that they could go out and have a day of fun together instead. Tessa had set her foot down on such actions once she’d reached the age of ten or so, not wanting to fall even further behind everyone else in class. To Tessa, it felt like she was always playing catch-up, always struggling to understand the lesson. Of course, much of the blame for that could be placed squarely on Gillian’s shoulders for moving them around so frequently. Tessa would have just settled in at a new school, become comfortable with the teacher, and even begun to make a friend or two when Gillian impulsively decided that Albuquerque was too crowed, or Palm Springs too commercial, or that the vibes she felt in Durango weren’t helping her creativity to flow and causing her latest bout of writer’s block.

So they would move again, packing up the few clothes and household goods they owned, and start over again in another city in the Southwest – Santa Fe, Yuma, Sedona, El Paso. Gillian loved the desert, loved the dry, hot climate, and insisted she never wanted to live anywhere else. She had never stopped to think how difficult each move was on her child, how hard the already shy and introverted Tessa had to struggle to fit in at each new school.

And as Tessa grew older and more observant, she began to realize that it wasn’t just creative reasons that prompted her mother to move them around so frequently – especially over the past few years when Gillian barely wrote at all. More often than not the reasons they would just pick up and get out of town were because Gillian owed money to someone and didn’t have the cash to pay them back. Or because she was suddenly anxious to get away from a boyfriend who’d become a little too demanding. And there had even been a few times when a social worker had started nosing around, usually after Gillian and Tessa had spent some time living in a homeless shelter.

Tessa hated to think about those times – the days and weeks when they had had no recourse but to stay in a shelter. Those stays had more often than not occurred when Gillian had been in a downward spiral, stuck in one of her depressive phases, and hadn’t been able to work. Tessa had been wary and intimidated by some of the other shelter occupants, and had stuck to her mother’s side like glue, even though Gillian hadn’t been in any condition to offer her much protection or reassurance.

Social workers and outreach volunteers had always seemed to be present at the shelters, interviewing occupants and doing what they could to get them into permanent housing and finding other services for them. It had been rather obvious that Gillian was in dire need of a mental health professional, and wasn’t in any shape to take proper care of Tessa. There had been talk of placing her in foster care while Gillian sought treatment, and Tessa had been terrified that she would be separated from her beloved mother and never see her again. She’d also overheard nightmarish stories from other shelter occupants about what had happened to their own children during their time in foster care – everything from molestation to physical abuse to neglect – and Tessa had begged her mother to get better so that she wouldn’t be subjected to such horrors.

Somehow or other, she’d managed to avoid being placed into foster care over the years, and now that she was old enough to hold down a part-time job and had learned by trial and error how to manage their little household, Tessa vowed silently that she would find a way to continue taking care of herself and Gillian.