The Glass Castle is the harrowing tale of Jeannette Wall’s life growing up in poverty with wayward parents. Following the Walls family through the desert to the coal-mining region of West Virginia to the fast-paced life of New York City, this memoir explores the nature of family, loyalty, and tragedy and what it takes to survive together and apart.
Rex Walls was a smart but unruly patriarch. He was a former Air Force pilot and had vast knowledge of science, physics, and engineering. He was known as a man who could fix everything and talk his way out of anything. These traits should have added up to success for Rex and his family, but his inability to settle down and follow the rules added up to the opposite.
During Jeannette’s early childhood, Rex moved the family around the desert like a traveling circus. They’d stop in one small cowpoke town after another, set up a life for a few weeks to months, then pack up and start again somewhere else. Rex said they had to keep moving to stay ahead of the law, which was always on his tail, or wealthy businessmen who wanted to steal his ideas. Rex fancied himself an inventor and always had some scheme or another that was sure to help him strike it rich. In reality, Rex was simply dodging bill collectors.
Striking it rich was Rex’s goal, as was being able to build the Glass Castle for his family, a sprawling home made completely of glass and powered by solar energy. He carried the blueprints everywhere the family went, and Jeannette and her siblings would help him design it.
Jeannette believed in her father and his plans for the future, but until those plans came to fruition, she and her family suffered.
Jeannette’s siblings—an older sister, Lori, a younger brother, Brian, and later, a baby sister, Maureen—were often left to their own devices for sustenance. Their mother, Rose Mary, had a lifelong dream of being an artist and spent most of her time painting and what little money she had on art supplies. Rose Mary’s art was her priority, even over feeding her children.
This priority is what led three-year-old Jeannette to cook hot dogs by herself if she was hungry. She’d stand on a stool and stir the hot dogs in boiling water on the gas stove. One day, while Rose Mary painted in the next room, Jeannette’s dress caught on fire. The flames consumed half of her little body, and she received skin grafts at the hospital. Her parents didn’t believe in western medicine, and after six weeks, Rex showed up and kidnapped her from the burn unit. He said they were checking out Rex Walls style.
Rex could never hold down a job for very long. He either quit or was fired for fighting with his superiors. He was an alcoholic and drank much of the family’s money away. With Rex drunk and unemployed most of the time and Rose Mary focused on her art, there was never much money or guidance in the Walls household.
All throughout her childhood, Jeannette and her siblings staved off starvation. She would rifle through garbage cans at school for discarded lunch items or forage for whatever she could find on the streets. On the rare occasions that there was food in the house, the family would gorge until it was gone. There was no sense of management or rationing when it came to food in her home, and by the end of every month, she’d be back to rummaging for garbage.
Jeannette and her siblings surmounted great adversity in their lives to become stable professionals. Not only were they always hungry, but they were also always too poor to afford clothes, shoes, and other necessities, like toothpaste, heat, and running water. The children were also victim to many close calls with their safety along the way.
For instance, when Rex and Rose Mary moved the family from Blythe, California to Battle Mountain, Nevada, the kids were forced to ride in the back of the U-Haul truck their parents had rented. On the trip, the doors to the storage cab flew open, and the children were almost sucked out as Rex barrelled down the highway without noticing.
On another occasion, Jeannette fell out of the family’s car while driving down the highway. She sat on the side of the road for what felt like hours waiting for her parents to notice she was gone and come back for her. When they finally did, the family had a good laugh about it.
Jeannette was also the target of bullying and aggression often. In one location out west, a group of older girls beat her up after school. At another school in West Virginia, she was beat up every day for being poor and dirty. In Battle Mountain, a delinquent child took a liking to Jeannette and tried to sexually assault her when she was eight years old. After she got away, the boy came to her house and shot at her and her siblings with a BB gun at close range.
Her parents never took these incidents very seriously, and Jeannette and her siblings grew close as they looked out for each other and kept each other safe.
Rex and Rose Mary fought often. Once, Rex tried to run down a pregnant Rose Mary with his car in the desert after they’d argued about how far along she was. There was the time Rose Mary and Rex argued about money and whose responsibility it was to support the family. The fight was so loud, it brought out the entire neighborhood and ended with Rose Mary dangling from an upstairs window after she tried to jump out.
There were also times when the fights were started by Rex after stumbling home drunk. He’d scream at the kids and destroy the house, and often, he became violent and threatening to Rose Mary. For example, after the family had moved to a house in Phoenix that Rose Mary had inherited, Rex broke all of the family heirlooms and threw Rose Mary on the ground. They each grabbed a knife, but within minutes, they were laughing and back in love.
Rex’s drinking caused many problems for his family, but there were a few stints of sobriety along the way, such as when Jeannette told him her birthday wish was for him to stop drinking. He detoxed in an upstairs bedroom and stayed sober for a couple of months, but he always fell off the wagon.
After the family moved to Rex’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia, his drinking became a full-time job. The town was small and blue collar, and the family lived in a dilapidated house on the side of the hill. The family would stay in that house until each child eventually packed up and moved to New York City as teenagers. But over the years, the house had fallen down around them. By the time Jeannette left for New York at seventeen, the only way in or out of the house was through the back window.
Lori and Jeannette couldn’t wait to get out of Welch and away from their parents. Lori was a talented artist and moved to New York City after graduating from college. She found a job, took art classes, and saved money for an apartment. A few years later, no longer able to take her mother’s indifference and laziness and Rex’s destructive behavior, Jeannette moved after her junior year and joined her sister. Brian would follow a year later, and Maureen a few years after when she was twelve.
In New York, the Walls children moved forward and started to make something of their lives. Jeannette had found a penchant for journalism back in high school. After a year of interning at a low-level newspaper in Brooklyn, she enrolled at Barnard College and took a job as an editorial assistant for a high-profile magazine. Brian was training to become a police officer, Lori was working as an illustrator for a comic book company, and Maureen was attending public school in Midtown.
Not long after Maureen left home, Rex and Rose Mary followed their children to New York. They stayed with Lori for a while and lived in a van for a few months, but eventually, they became homeless. Despite all of their children’s efforts to try to help them, Rex and Rose Mary liked the freedom of homelessness. It was another adventure for two adventure junkies.
Jeannette radiated with shame about the way her parents lived. She felt guilty, embarrassed, and burdened, and she struggled to find contentment with her life, even after marrying a wealthy man and moving into a swanky Park Avenue apartment. Her career had taken off after college, and she was part of the New York social scene, writing columns about the comings and goings of high society. Whenever someone asked about her background or parents, she lied.
All of the Walls children were adults and thriving in their chosen professions, all but Maureen. Maureen had never truly fit into the family because of how much younger she was than the other children, and she struggled to find direction in New York. She dropped out of college, moved into a tenement building where her parents were squatting, and eventually was sent to a mental hospital in Upstate New York after stabbing Rose Mary. When she was released, she moved to California and never came back.
During one winter in New York, Rex contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for six weeks. He was sober again for the first time since Phoenix and moved Upstate to get off the streets and stay that way. But Rose Mary didn’t want to be alone when winter rolled around again, so he moved back to the city and regained his old habits. All of the drinking and smoking finally caught up to him, and he died at the age of fifty-nine.
Without their patriarch, the Walls family became estranged. Brian got married, had a daughter, and became a detective in the NYPD. Jeannette divorced her first husband, remarried, and moved Upstate to a large farmhouse, where she wrote this book. Five years after Rex’s death, the family came back together to celebrate Thanksgiving, minus Maureen. They reminisced about their wild past and agreed that life with Rex Walls was never dull. At this, at least, they all could finally agree.
Jeannette Walls saw the unmistakable image of her mother digging through trash one March night. Wind whipped down the streets of New York City. It had been months since Jeannette had seen her mother. She was in a taxi dressed up for a fancy party, and her mother, Rose Mary, stood fifteen feet away.
Rose Mary’s hair was worn, mussed, and gray, and she was thin with sunken features. For a second, Jeannette remembered other images of her mother—swan diving off cliffs, painting landscapes, reading Shakespeare to Jeannette and her siblings.
When Rose Mary glanced up, Jeannette ducked below the window. She didn’t want to be recognized and possibly outed as this homeless woman’s child. She was only blocks away from her party. Any of the other guests might see her and uncover the truth of who she was.
Jeannette asked the driver to take her home, instead of to the party. Inside her Park Avenue apartment, she took in the lavish furnishings. She’d created a space that would suit the kind of woman she wanted to be. But thoughts of her parents suffering on the streets were never far off. The shame of her luxuries and being embarrassed in the taxi weighed on her.
Jeannette and Rose Mary met for lunch a few days later, and the conversation was as random and ludicrous as ever. Her mother had cleaned up a bit, wearing a sweater with fewer stains and men’s shoes. Rose Mary launched into a discussion about the Picasso retrospective she’d seen. She didn’t think much of Picasso.
Jeannette tried to offer her parents assistance, but Rose Mary pushed the idea away. They didn’t need Jeannette’s money. Rose Mary said if Jeannette wanted to help her, she could buy her an electrolysis treatment because looking good raises your spirits.
Jeannette’s earliest memory is the day she caught on fire when she was three years old. Her family, which included Rose Mary; her father, Rex; older sister, Lori, and younger brother, Brian, lived in a trailer in southern Arizona. Jeannette was wearing a pink party dress and stirring hot dogs in boiling water. She had to stand on a chair to reach the pot.
Jeannette knew how to cook hot dogs. She did it often as the only means of having something to eat. Her mother was usually consumed with painting, as she was now in the next room. The only other person home was her little brother. The bottom edge of Jeannette’s dress brushed up against the flames and consumed one side of her body. Rose Mary put the flames out with a blanket and calmly asked their neighbor to drive them to the hospital. Rex was out with the car.
Life was so good at the hospital compared to home, Jeannette never wanted to leave. She loved having her own room and the cleanliness and quiet. She’d also never watched TV before and spent most of her time watching old sitcoms, like The Lucille Ball Show. Sometimes, she’d pass the time reading to the nurses. They were impressed with how well she could read.
Mostly, Jeannette loved all the food. She was given three meals a day and ice cream, Jell-O, or fruit cocktail for dessert. One of the nurses even gave Jeannette her first piece of gum. There was always more food and gum. Nothing ever ran out like at home. It was paradise.
Jeannette sustained severe burns on one side of her chest, and the doctors performed skin grafts using skin from her thighs. The hospital staff questioned Jeannette about her injuries. They asked if her parents hurt her, where her other cuts and bruises came from, and why she was cooking by herself. Jeannette wasn’t fazed. She said she was cut and bruised from playing outside and that she always cooked hot dogs. Her mother said she was very mature.
Whenever Jeannette’s family came to visit, they were loud and unruly. Her parents would argue, sing, laugh, and make a general ruckus that earned admonishments from the staff.
Rex was always the more gregarious. He threatened to beat up the nurses and doctors if Jeannette wasn’t being treated right. Her mother wasn’t much better. When she found out about the nurse and the chewing gum, she went into a tirade about what a disgusting habit chewing gum was. She was going to give that nurse the what-for.
Rex thought it would have been better if Jeannette had seen the witch doctor they’d taken her older sister to after she was bitten by a scorpion. He said she’d heal faster than being stuck in here with the quacks they called doctors. In fact, Rex started a fight with one of the doctors. He argued that keeping her in bandages didn’t allow the burns to breathe. The doctor countered that the bandages warded off infections. Rex pulled his fist back in anticipation for a punch, but the doctor backed away. A security guard escorted the family out of the hospital.
The next time the family visited Jeannette, Brian’s head was wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage. He’d fallen off the couch and cracked his head open. Despite the significant amount of blood, they’d bandaged Brian up at home. One hospitalized child was enough, said Rose Mary.
Jeannette had been hospitalized for six weeks when her parents decided it had been long enough. One day, Rex walked into her room and said they were about to check out Rex Walls style. Jeanette questioned the decision, but he told her to trust him.
She could smell Rex’s signature scent of stale whiskey, cigarettes, and hair product when he leaned over to pick her up. Rex scurried down the hall with Jeannette in his arms. Outside, the whole family sat waiting in the running blue station wagon, the Blue Goose. Rex placed her in the back seat and told her not to worry. She was finally safe.
Jeannette was back cooking hotdogs days after returning home. She also had a new obsession with fire. She started testing how long she could hold her finger over a candle flame and stared in awe at garbage fires in her neighborhood. She played with matches and made small fires with paper, debris, and plastic dolls. Her parents were proud she’d embraced her accident so bravely.
Jeannette didn’t know much about her father’s past. He never liked to talk about his upbringing in Welch, West Virginia or his parents. All she knew was that Rex left home when he was seventeen to join the Air Force.
When Rex met Rose Mary, he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The day he met her, he said they were going to get married. Rose Mary was coy at first, stating that twenty-three men had already tried to marry her, but Rex was persistent. He wore her down until she said yes, and they were married six months later.
Lori was conceived a few months after the wedding. A year later, their second child, Mary Charlene, was born but died nine months later from sudden infant death syndrome. Two years after Mary Charlene’s death, Jeannette was born. Rose Mary called her the replacement child. Brian came along a year later. He was born in mid-seizure and couldn’t breathe. Rose Mary said he was likely a “goner,” but Brian lived, and the seizures stopped.
Rose Mary never showed much emotion about Mary Charlene. She said it was God’s decision, and he’d had his reasons for taking her back. But Rex was a different story. Rex was the one who’d found her dead in the crib, and whenever her name came up, he’d leave the room. After her death, Rex changed. He started drinking, became moody, and started to get fired from every job he got.
At one point, Rex sold Rose Mary’s diamond wedding ring for cash without telling her. The stone was big, and Rose Mary’s mother, Grandma Smith, had paid for it. After that, Rose Mary brought the stolen ring up whenever she was angry with Rex. But Rex said he would buy her a bigger ring as soon as they were rich.
The Walls family was never in one place for long. Every now and then, Rex would wake everyone up and proclaim they had fifteen minutes to grab their stuff. It was time to skedaddle. They never had much to pack, just a few cast-iron pots and pans, Rex’s gun, and Rose Mary’s paintings, art supplies, and archery set.
Rex said there were people after him, which was why they always had to skedaddle. He referred to them as vampires, Nazis, or corporate sharks trying to steal his ideas. There were also FBI agents with some mysterious grievance against him. In reality, as Rose Mary often said when Rex wasn’t around, they were simply running from bill collectors.
The drive was always the same. Their parents sang songs to keep them entertained, and Rex told them about his big plans to strike it rich. There was never a destination in sight. They would end up wherever they did, which was often one cowpoke mining town or another in the Southwest. The towns were small and dirty, with ramshackle dwellings, a handful of stores, and always a bar. The more secluded and abandoned a town was, the more appeal it had to her parents.
For a month or two, Rex would find work as an engineer or electrician after lying about degrees and work experience he didn’t have. When he was bored with one job, he’d find a random odd job to keep money coming in. Other times, he’d bet what little money they had playing poker.
This was the pattern. Rex would quit or get fired, bills would pile up, and the “FBI” would close in. Rex would rouse the family, pack up the car, and do it all again in some other town.
Although the locations always changed, the kind of people they called neighbors rarely did. In each town, they’d find people struggling the same as they did. There’d be former criminals, prostitutes, veterans, and old people who’d lived there so long, they started to look as weathered as their surroundings.
None of the children had many friends. Sometimes, Jeannette and her siblings went to school, but more often, their parents taught them at home. Rose Mary taught them to read and challenged them with difficult books for older kids or adults. Rex was knowledgeable in math and science and contributed lessons in those subjects. They also learned survival skills. Rex taught them Morse code and how to shoot a gun and use a bow and arrow. Jeannette was a crack shot by age four, which Rex said would be useful in a shootout with law enforcement.
Both Rex and Rose Mary were at home in the desert. They knew how to work the land, which plants were toxic or medicinal, and where to find water sources. Rose Mary promoted unpurified water over the high-falutin chlorinated water the “namby-pambies” drank in the cities. Toothpaste was baking soda and hydrogen peroxide rubbed on with their fingers.
Food was always a scarcity in the household. The family had no routine surrounding meals. When they had food, they devoured it in great quantities quickly. When they didn’t, it was up to each one to scrounge for sustenance. They ate whatever they could from whatever source they could find.
Rex had big plans for the family’s future. He was going to find gold and turn everything around. Rex was considered a bit of a genius by those who knew him. He was handy and could fix anything with a little ingenuity, such as the time he fixed a neighbor’s TV with an elbow noodle. He was well-versed in high-level mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering. He studied energy creation and fancied himself an inventor.
Rex was building a machine that would separate gold from dirt and rocks. It was called the Prospector, and it would help the family secure a stockpile of gold nuggets they could use to support themselves. He worked on his machine behind the house and let the kids help.
Jeannette believed in her father’s wisdom and abilities. She loved when he told stories about his great feats of bravery in the Air Force, which always ended in him saving a soldier or a whole troop from death and danger. He’d helped save thousands from drowning after fixing a part of the Hoover Dam, and he’d thwarted a terrorist attack on the Air Force base after meeting the guy in a bar. The stories were always told in a way that made Rex the big hero.
These stories were often replaced by the outlandish plans for their futures. The most significant of Rex’s plans was the Glass Castle, a house made completely out of glass and operated by solar power. He’d drawn up blueprints and took them everywhere they went. Once the Prospector found gold, he’d begin construction on the house.
Rex had decided the fastest way to accumulate the money needed for the Prospector was to go to Las Vegas and win big. Jeannette was four years old.
On the way, they’d driven past a bar along a Nevada roadside. Rex and Rose Mary left the kids in the afternoon heat and went inside. The children tried to count the number of times they’d moved to a new home, differentiating between the places where’d they’d only stayed a week or shorter. They counted eleven before they lost count.
After a few hours, they were all on the road again. Rex was drinking a beer and smoking while driving, and he took a turn too sharply and hit some railroad tracks. The back door flew open, and Jeannette tumbled out of the car. The only one who noticed was Brian.
Jeannette rolled down an embankment and came to a stop bruised and bloody. She watched as the car vanished down the road. It was a hot and dusty day in the desert. When the car didn’t return, Jeannette started to wonder if she was somehow expendable. She cried and tried to decide what to do.
After a long time, the car finally came back into view. Rex got out to comfort Jeannette, but she pulled away. He explained that they didn’t know what had happened because Brian was crying too hard to tell them. He cleaned her wounds and said her snot locker was really banged up. She started to laugh, and back in the car, everyone had a good laugh with her.
A Las Vegas motel room served as Jeannette’s family home for a month before they did the skedaddle. The kids went to the casinos with Rex, playing tag or hunting for abandoned quarters in slot machines. Rex played blackjack, bragging that he had a system that was unstoppable. For a while, the system worked.
Rex took his winnings and bought everyone cowboy hats and vests with fringe. One night, after a particularly successful day at the tables, Rex took them to a restaurant. They each ate steaks and ordered a flaming ice cream cake for dessert. Rex said they were living the high-roller life they deserved.
A couple of nights after the flaming cake, Jeannette’s parents came back from the casino in a hurry. They said it was time to skedaddle again. The casino was on to Rex’s system, and they had to put as much distance as they could between them and the mafia hot on his trail. Her mother wanted to live near the ocean, so they headed for California.
Jeannette’s fascination with fire was the catalyst for another Walls family skedaddle shortly after arriving in San Francisco. Rose Mary didn’t want to stay in what she called “tourist traps” near the wharf, so the family found an affordable hotel in the Tenderloin District, where many of the residents were prostitutes.
The children were often left alone in the hotel while their parents went in search of investment capital for the Prospector. Jeannette found a box of wooden matches and took them to the bathroom. She built a mound of toilet paper in the toilet, set it on fire, and flushed only when the flames were lapping high out of the basin.
A few nights later, Jeannette woke up to a fire in their room. The curtains were flaming a few steps from her bed. Her parents weren’t there, and she couldn’t rouse Brian and Lori. The fire continued to grow, but suddenly the door burst open. Rex led them out of the room and across the street to a bar. Jeannette watched the fire through the bar windows wondering if all the fires in the world were connected. Was the fire that burned her connected to this fire? Was the fire still after her? She took on a new perspective about life. At any moment, your world could go up in a blaze. That truth never left her.
After San Francisco, the family picked up and headed back into the desert. They stumbled across a small community called Midland and rented a two-room house surrounded by sand.
One night, Jeannette heard what sounded like a snake under her bed. She woke her father up. But Rex told her it was probably just a demon, the same one he’d been hunting for years. He made a game out of searching for the demon. They called it demon hunting. Rex told Jeannette all you had to do to get rid of a demon was to look it in the eye. Demon hunting became a frequent pastime from then on.
There were no trees or vegetation in Midland, and water had to be brought in for the residents. Not long after they’d arrived, Rosy Mary announced she was pregnant. She busied herself with her art while waiting for the baby to arrive. She painted, sketched, made sculptures, and worked on novels, plays, and a children’s book.
Rex, on the other hand, got a job digging rocks in a gypsum mine. He said as soon as the baby was born, they would move to the larger town of Blythe, California twenty miles away.
Christmas for Jeannette’s family was different than it was for other families. Rex and Rose Mary opted to celebrate a week after Christmas to take advantage of the post-holiday sales. They’d pick up used trees from the roadside and wrap small toys and trinkets in wrapping paper discarded by other families. The presents were never from Santa Clause. Rose Mary said she wouldn’t lie to her children, like other parents did, or brainwash them into believing silly myths about elves making toys.
When Christmas rolled around that first year in the Midland, Rex didn’t have enough money even for their meager celebration. He’d been fired from the mine after arguing with his supervisor. On Christmas Eve, Rex took each child out into the desert and told them to pick out a star in the sky as their present. He said they would always be able to find their stars, which made them luckier than kids who would grow out of their presents in a year. Jeannette chose Venus even though it wasn’t a star.
As soon as Rose Mary was close to giving birth, Rex moved his family to Blythe. On the short drive over, Rex and Rose Mary got into an argument about how far along the pregnancy was. Rose Mary was adamant she was at ten months, and Rex, toasty from the tequila he’d bought earlier with money from fixing a car, said she had lost count. The fight continued until Rose Mary jumped out of the car and ran off into the desert night.
Rex turned the car and headed in the direction she’d run. He chased her down, yelling obscenities out the window and threatening her if she didn’t get into the car. Rose Mary kept running, diving in and out of bushes. At one point, Rex slammed on the gas and drove straight at her. Rose Mary jumped out of the way, and he turned the car around and charged her again.
Jeannette and her siblings cried and yelled for Rex to stop the car, but he didn’t. He kept chasing her until he had her up against a boulder. He jumped out of the car, grabbed her, and dragged her back while she fought and screamed. The next day, Rex and Rose Mary were back to normal as if nothing had happened.
Blythe was a large town, with two movie theaters and as many prisons. The town offered more civilization than the Walls family was used to, but Rex and Rose Mary hated it. They thought desert towns should be small and dusty, not sprawling and teeming with people.
The larger town meant different rules for Jeannette and her siblings. For the first time, they were required to wear shoes outdoors. They also had to go to school. Their assimilation was bumpy at first. Jeannette and her siblings could read ahead of their grade levels because of their lessons at home, and Jeannette quickly became a teacher’s pet. The other students took an immediate disliking to her.
One day, four Latina girls waited for Jeannette in the alley near their apartment and beat her up. When Rex saw her bruised and bloody, he acted proud, but Brian was livid. When the same girls waited for Jeannette the next day, Brian jumped out from behind a bush and swung a large tree branch to keep the girls away. The branch broke, and the girls surrounded Brian and beat him to the ground until Jeannette smacked one of them in the head with a rock.
Two months after the move, Lilly Ruth Maureen Walls was born. Two days later, Rex checked Rose Mary and the baby out of the hospital Rex Walls style. Jeannette held the baby on the drive home and promised her new sister she would always look after her.
The addition of Maureen to the family did nothing to change the Walls’ way of life. She was only a few months old when it was time to skedaddle again. Rex had been driving through Blythe with the whole family when a police car pulled up behind them. Their car wasn’t registered or insured, and Rex had stolen the license plates off another vehicle. He said if the police pulled them over, the whole family would be arrested, then led the police on a chase through town.
He made a few quick moves, then turned down an alley and hid in a vacant garage. They ditched the car and walked home. The next morning, Rex announced they were moving to Battle Mountain, Nevada, where an unearthed supply of gold was located. Battle Mountain was their ticket to riches.
The drive to Battle Mountain was one of the longest and more harrowing of Jeannette’s childhood. With no car, her parents rented a U-Haul truck. Rose Mary told the kids they’d have to ride in the back with the furniture, but it would be like an amazing adventure. The trip would take fourteen hours if they drove straight through, but she thought they might take some scenic routes. The only rule was no talking. Someone might hear them.
As soon as the truck started moving, Maureen started crying. Her wails echoed in the small confined truck, but nothing Jeannette or Lori did quieted her down. Whenever the truck hit a bump, the children were thrown around in the dark. It grew cold in the truck, and after several hours, they all had to use the restroom.
Suddenly, the truck hit a pothole, and the back doors flew open. Wind whipped through, threatening to suck the children out. The doors clanged against the sides, but Rex didn’t stop. The kids couldn’t reach the wall behind the cabin because of the furniture, so they screamed and banged on the sides, but the engine drowned them out.
Brian tried to catch one of the swinging doors and almost got sucked out. They hunkered down and waited for their parents to notice. After a while, a pair of headlights appeared behind them. The driver saw the children and honked to get Rex’s attention.
When Rex ran to the back, he was furious, but Jeannette thought he also looked scared. He told the kids they were lucky that car wasn’t the police because they’d all be in jail if it was. He closed the doors again, double-checking the latch this time, and restarted the journey.
Jeannette was around six years old when they arrived in Battle Mountain. The town didn’t seem like a mecca for gold. The community was pocket-sized, one street with a handful of buildings dwarfed by the expansive desert sky.
The Walls family moved into an old train depot in a part of town near the outskirts known as the Tracks. There was an old office upstairs that served as the parents’ room, and the kids slept in the old waiting area downstairs, benches still attached to the walls. Discarded items found in the desert were used as furniture. Old wooden cable spools became tables, crates became chairs, and cardboard boxes became beds. Rex and Rose Mary discussed trying to find beds for the kids, but they protested. Sleeping in the box was an adventure, the children said.
Rex found a job as a mine electrician, which regulated his time in a more positive way. He was up early, and when he came home in the afternoon, he played with the children. When he wasn’t around, Jeannette and Brian would go exploring in the desert. Jeannette became a collector of treasured rocks, such as turquoise and geodes.
With Rex working, they could afford to go out to eat Sunday nights. They went to the Owl Club, one of two casinos in town. They’d gorge on burgers and milkshakes and leave stuffed. There was also plenty of food at home. The mine included a commissary, and a monthly stipend for groceries and the rent amount were automatically deducted from Rex’s salary.
Rose Mary thought cooking was a waste of time. She could paint a picture that would last forever in the time it took to make a meal that would be gone in moments. So at the beginning of each week, they’d pick up their groceries, and whatever wasn’t ready-to-serve would get put in a pot. They’d eat each meal from the pot over the rest of the week, even if the food started to spoil.
The problem was the Walls’ inability to budget. Their habit of gorging themselves when food was available led to larger bills at the commissary. Rex’s salary would run out before the month was up, and sometimes he owed money.
However, one place money wasn’t going to was the bars. Rex had curbed his drinking, choosing instead to stay home with his family spread around the room reading. A large dictionary was opened in the middle of the room for the kids to look up unfamiliar words. If Jeannette didn’t agree with a definition, she and Rex would write letters to the publishers in protest.
Jeannette and her siblings were enrolled in the elementary school in Battle Mountain. She entered the second grade, and although she was light years ahead of her class in reading and math, she kept quiet. She’d learned what being the class pet could lead to in Blythe.
The other kids were mostly sons and daughters of miners and gamblers, and they also lived in the Tracks. The Walls children finally had other kids to play with. Rex would often play with them, and the neighborhood children sometimes asked for Rex instead of his kids.
Rose Mary didn’t set limits for her children. She believed children learned best from their own mistakes, so she gave them the freedom to make them. When Jeannette gashed her thigh on a rusty nail, Rose Mary dismissed it as a flesh wound. She said people made a fuss over the smallest things, which made them weak. She sent Jeannette back out to play.
Brian and Jeannette loved exploring. Along with the desert, they explored the town dump. One day, they stumbled onto toxic chemicals in large bins. They took glass jars and filled them with the chemicals, then took them to an abandoned shack. They mixed potions together, but when nothing happened, they decided to see if they could catch on fire.
The next day, they dropped a match into a mixture of different chemicals, and a fire bomb shot up into the air. The shack caught on fire and spread so fast, they became trapped inside. Jeannette kicked a board out and escaped, but Brian was still inside. She ran for help and happened to run into Rex walking back from work. Rex ran to the shack and pulled Brian out. As Rex watched the shack burn, he marveled at the luck of him walking by right at that moment. Then, he explained the physical reaction that made the top of the flames shimmer like a mirage.
Deeper in the desert outside of town was a natural hot spring called the Hot Pot. The water was warm on the edges and hot in the middle. Unlike Brian and Lori, Jeannette didn’t know how to swim. Bodies of water scared her. At first, she waded in just enough to get her bottom half wet. Rex said it was time for her to learn to swim, so he secured her arms around his neck and swam her across to the other side.
The second time he went across, he pulled her arms free and shoved her to the center. Without anything to hold onto, Jeannette sunk below the surface. Her arms flailed and she took in mouthfuls of hot sulfuric water. Rex grabbed her and moved her to the shallow end.
After she had calmed down and was breathing normally again, he tossed her back in the middle. Again, she sank below the surface and choked on the water. Rex continued this pattern over and over—saving her, then tossing her back. Once she realized what was going on, she used her arms to maneuver away from him. She made it to the side and stumbled out.
Rex shouted, “You did it,” and hurried to her side, but she was fuming. Brian and Lori tried to congratulate her, but she wouldn’t have it. She was even mad at her mother, who’d bathed on her back as though nothing had happened. Rex said that at some point, you had to either sink or swim. You couldn’t cling to the sides forever. That was the lesson he was trying to teach her. Why else would he have done it? When Jeannette calmed down, she decided to believe him. She couldn’t come up with any other answer.
The comfortable life the Walls family had enjoyed for the past six months ended after Rex lost his job. It was the longest he’d ever held a steady position. Jeannette assumed they’d be moving again, but they didn’t. Rex said he intentionally got fired so he could have more time to find gold.
The family no longer had credit at the commissary, and there were no savings. When their food ran out, they couldn’t buy more. Every now and then, an odd job or gambling spoils would give them enough to eat for a few days. Sometimes, Rex left and returned an hour later with an armload of vegetables and made a stew. Mostly, they went hungry.
Rex’s time at the house dwindled. He stayed out more and more in the evenings. He was gone so much, Maureen’s first words were practically, “Where’s Daddy?”
Rose Mary wasn’t much help. The children mostly kept their empty stomachs to themselves, not wanting to upset her. When they did complain, she merely shrugged. What was she supposed to do about it?
Food became an obsession for Jeannette, Brian, and Lori. They were always plotting about how they could find something to eat. Jeannette started stealing small items of food from other kid’s lunches at school. When she played at a friend’s house, she’d slip into the kitchen and rummage for something to eat. She’d inhale the food in the bathroom, then go back out to play.
One day, after two months of starving, Rex walked in with a bag of groceries. There was canned corn, bread, milk, sugar, margarine, and two containers of deviled ham. The family stuffed themselves on deviled ham sandwiches and milk. After one night, the only thing left was the stick of margarine.
The next day, Jeannette found Lori eating the butter with a spoon after school. She’d mixed it with sugar, and the two girls ate every bite. When Rose Mary came home, she fumed about the missing stick of margarine. She said she was saving it to spread on bread.
When the girls pointed out there was no more bread, Rose Mary countered that she was going to borrow flour to bake some. When the girls pointed out the gas had been turned off, Rose Mary said they could have used the margarine whenever the gas got turned back on. She said thanks to the girls’ gluttony, there would be no margarine if they ever had bread again.
Jeannette had reached her limit. She screamed that she and Lori were hungry and had nothing to eat. Rose Mary stared stunned. The unspoken rule in the Walls family was to ignore their troubles, and Jeannette was bringing a big one to light.
When Rex came home, Rose Mary screamed that she was sick of taking the blame for everything that went wrong. She said it wasn’t her responsibility to feed the kids and it was up to Rex to make money. But Rex was developing a system to pull gold from the center of rocks and needed seed money to perfect it. He suggested they ask Grandma Smith for money, but Rose Mary refused. The fight lasted all night.
Fights between Rex and Rose Mary were not infrequent, but they always made up within a day. This fight was different. Jeannette and her siblings didn’t know what to do when her parents picked up where they left off the next morning.
Rose Mary told Rex to find another job, and Rex countered she should get a job if she wanted a paycheck around the house. She screamed that she was an artist, and Rex screamed that she never sold any art. The screaming could be heard down the street, and soon neighbors came outside to watch. The kids took Maureen outside to play, hoping their frivolity would make the neighbors think everything was fine.
Suddenly, one of Rose Mary’s paintings was tossed from the upstairs window, followed by her easel, followed by Rose Mary. She swung from the window, her body dangling and thrashing. Rex held her arms to keep her from falling. Rose Mary yelled that Rex was trying to kill her, but she fought him whenever he tried to pull her back in.
The children ran inside and up to the bedroom. They held onto Rex so he wouldn’t get pulled out. When Rex finally got Rose Mary back inside, Lori tended to her. Brian watched his parents with disgust. But Jeannette stood somewhere in the middle, saying everything was fine, repeating it like a mantra.
The truth was, Rose Mary had a teaching certificate and could easily get a job at the Battle Mountain middle school, since they were always short on teachers. The day after the fight, she awoke with the kids and applied for a job. She was hired immediately to teach Lori’s middle school class.
Rose Mary was a hit with the students. She gave them as wide a berth to be free and reckless as she did her children. She was loving toward her students, hugging them and constantly giving them words of encouragement. Some of the troubled kids actually started performing well, but her popularity ended with the kids.
The other teachers thought Rose Mary’s no-rules philosophy was irresponsible. The principal, Miss Beatty, was aghast when she observed the class one day. Kids ran wild while Rose Mary did nothing or contributed to the wildness. Miss Beatty ordered Rose Mary to submit weekly progress reports and lesson plans.
Rose Mary was either unable or unwilling to follow the rules, so the Walls children started helping her with her job. Jeannette cleaned her classroom, Lori helped write her lesson plans, and all three of them helped grade homework.
Lori had been proofreading Rose Mary’s writing since she was seven, and the work she did was exceptional. Rose Mary thought Lori was brilliant, and the two grew closer. When they weren’t working on assignments, they would draw or work on other art projects together.
With Rose Mary working, life started to improve a little, but not to the level Jeanette had hoped. They’d been able to stay in the depot and pay rent to the mine owner, but the children still wore old, dingy clothes. Food was around more often, but it ran out quickly, and they’d be hungry again until the next paycheck.
Another issue that kept them from prospering was Rex’s ego. Rex liked that Rose Mary was working, but he was the man of the house and still wanted to control the money. He said he needed to use part of her salary to finish his invention, but Rose Mary knew the money went to the bars in town. Still, she could never say no. When she tried, he’d beg, pout, annoy, and bully her until she gave in.
For a while, she hid her checks or pretended she lost the money, but then Rex started showing up on payday to collect the check himself. He’d drive her to the bank and take the money. One day, when Rex couldn’t find parking, Rose Mary went into the bank and came out holding one of her socks, which she’d hidden money in. She told Jeannette to hide the sock in a safe place because socks were hard to come by. All of this, including a gratuitous wink, was done in front of Rex. No one was fooled.
After collecting what was left of the money, Rex took the family to the Owl Club for steaks to celebrate payday. They spent a week’s worth of groceries gorging themselves. After dinner, Rex asked Jeannette if he could see the sock Mom had given her. Jeannette looked for an ally around the table, but all eyes were turned away. She handed over the sock, and Rex left a ten dollar tip.
Jeannette and Rex had always had a special bond. They were close, and she thought he could do no wrong. Rex told Jeannette she was his favorite because she was the only one who had faith in him. So when Lori and Brian started to criticize their father’s behavior, she defended him and his inventions. Jeannette was angry that her siblings thought Rex was a worthless drunk, but she also noticed that Brian seemed put out by something more than Rex’s drinking. She noticed it first one day when they passed the Green Lantern.
The Green Lantern was a brothel run out of a large green house near the highway. The women hung around the porch in short dresses or swimsuits waving to each car that passed. Jeannette and Brian didn’t know what went on inside, but they liked to spy on the house from bushes. One day, Jeannette dared Brian to go talk to one of the women. She was seven, and he was six. Brian talked to the women for a long time, and when he came back, he said that men go inside, and women are nice to them. After that, Brian always waved to the women on the porch.
But on this particular day, Brian didn’t wave back when a woman called out to him. Jeannette questioned how the woman knew his name, and Brian told her the story.
For Brian’s birthday that year, Rex had taken him to the store to pick out a comic book. Afterward, Rex took him to the Nevada Hotel, the other casino in town. They ate dinner with a woman named Ginger, the same woman who waved from the porch. Following dinner, the three went to a suite in the hotel. Rex and Ginger disappeared into the bedroom, and Brian was left in the main room to read his book.
By the time Rex and Ginger came out, Brian had read and reread the comic at least twice. Ginger sat down and made a fuss over the comic, and Rex made him give it to her.
Jeannette knew the way Brian was acting wasn’t just about the comic book, but she didn’t know what else could have happened. She still didn’t know what happened at the Green Lantern, and Brian wouldn’t say anymore about it.
When Jeannette was eight years old, a boy named Billy Deel moved to town with his father. He was three years older and one side of his head was dented in. Billy had a reputation as a delinquent, and neighbors started accusing him of torturing and killing their pets. Jeannette thought the worst thing about Billy was the way he looked at her.
Billy told the other kids that Jeannette was his girlfriend. Although she denied it and didn’t like Billy, she couldn’t help but enjoy the attention a little. Jeannette told Billy she would be his friend but not his girlfriend. Billy said if she became his girlfriend, he would protect her and buy her gifts. He said if she wouldn’t, she’d regret it. Jeannette wasn’t afraid of Billy. She said they could be friends or nothing.
A week later, Billy gave Jeannette a turquoise and silver ring that belonged to his mother. She didn’t want to take the ring and give Billy the wrong impression, but she hadn’t received a present for a long time, certainly never jewelry. She decided to keep it but not wear it.
A few weeks later, Jeannette was playing hide and seek with some kids from the Track. She hid in an old secluded tool shed she thought no one would find. But Billy found her and climbed in to hide even though he hadn’t been part of the game.
The shed was small, barely big enough for one person, and Jeannette told him to find another spot. They were sitting so close their legs touched and his breath warmed her face. For the first time, Jeannette was scared.
Billy started talking about the Green Lantern. He told her what happened inside and that sometimes the men stabbed the women if they struggled. He pressed his mouth against hers and kissed her hard. Jeannette struggled, but that only made him push harder.
Billy made fast work of unbuttoning his pants. He started to tug on Jeannette’s shorts. She wanted to knee him, like her father had showed her, but he was between her legs. Instead, she bit his ear with all her might. Billy screamed and punched her in the face. The other kids heard the scream and ran to the shed. When they opened the door, Jeannette crawled out with her pants down and blood spurting from her nose.
The day after the shed, Jeannette marched over to Billy’s house and tossed the ring at him. She said they weren’t friends anymore. As she started to walk away, Billy shouted that he’d raped her. Jeannette didn’t know what the word meant, so she said it was no big deal. But when she got home, she looked it up in the dictionary. She still wasn’t clear what “rape” meant, but this time she didn’t ask her dad to explain. She had a feeling that would lead to trouble.
Rex and Rose Mary were out at the bar the next night. The kids were playing cards at home when they heard Billy shouting at Jeannette from outside. Lori went to tell Billy to get lost, but she came back a second later. Billy had a gun.
Billy broke out the first-floor window and pointed the gun at them. Brian could tell it was only a BB gun, but it didn’t matter. At that range, even BBs could do damage. Billy opened fire, and the kids flipped over the spool table as a barricade.
Lori ran upstairs and grabbed Rex’s loaded handgun. She pointed it at Billy and pulled the trigger. Silence followed. They ran outside, but Billy had ducked before the shot. He jumped up and ran to the train tracks, stopping every few feet to unload another round of BBs in their direction.
Jeannette grabbed the gun and shot it. The bullet landed in the dirt by Billy’s feet, and he sprinted away. Jeannette and her siblings laughed, but it soon faded. Jeannette was shaking.
When Rex and Rose Mary came back to the depot, it was in a police cruiser. Neighbors had called in the gun fight, and the cops had found them at the bar. Jeannette said it was self-defense and tried to explain the situation, but the police weren’t interested.
The cop told Rex the family would have to go in front of a judge the next day to straighten the matter out. After the cop left, Rex and Rose Mary went upstairs to talk. When they finally came down, faces drawn, they announced they were moving to Phoenix. Everyone was allowed to bring one thing. Jeannette brought her favorite geode.
The family piled into their car that night, and Jeannette watched through the back window as they pulled away from the longest home she’d ever had.
Jeannette was excited to go to Phoenix and see her maternal grandmother. But her excitement turned to disappointment when Rose Mary casually told her that her grandma had died. Rose Mary said she hadn’t told the children because she simply hadn’t seen the point.
Part of Rose Mary’s inheritance was an option between two houses in Phoenix: a big white house in the Phoenix suburbs or a smaller adobe near the business district downtown. Rose Mary chose the adobe so she could start an art studio. Her art career could really flourish in a place like Phoenix. She quit teaching and used the inheritance money to buy all the art supplies she wanted.
The adobe home was massive, with fourteen rooms total, all full of antiques and family heirlooms. There was a front yard and backyard, where trees stood tall, including orange trees. Although once an upscale neighborhood, most of the houses on their street had been converted to apartments.
Rose Mary turned two rooms downstairs into a studio and gallery and placed a sign in the front yard. She also purchased several typewriters and spent a lot of time working on her writing. Rex was hired as an electrician after joining the labor union, which brought in a steady income. With his first paycheck, he bought each of the children a new bicycle, something none of them had ever had before.
Despite the addition of certain luxuries, such as a working telephone and electric washing machine, there were still problems in the house. An army of cockroaches multiplied thanks to the unkempt conditions inside. Rose Mary didn’t believe in using pesticides to kill living things, so they held massacres in the evenings. They’d sneak into the kitchen, flip on the light, and swat at the walls, floors, and surfaces with shoes or magazines.
There was also a termite infestation. Rex discovered the extent of the problem after Lori’s foot pushed through the floorboards one night. But the problem was too large to fix, so they ignored the pests and crashed through multiple points in the floor. Whenever a new hole opened up, Rex would hammer an empty beer can over it as a patch.
Jeannette, Brian, and Lori enrolled in Emerson Public School, a nice school in a nice neighborhood with lush grass and banana trees. All three children were placed in gifted reading groups upon entry. The school also had a nurse, and the Walls children were given vision and hearing exams for the first time. This was how they found out Lori was nearsighted.
Rose Mary wouldn’t hear of getting glasses for Lori. She thought glasses only made poor eyesight worse and that Lori needed to strengthen her eyes through use. But the school said Lori couldn’t attend without them.
When Lori received her glasses, she looked at the world outside with wonder. She’d never seen leaves on trees, words on billboards, or birds in the distance. She was seeing the world for the first time, and she cried with joy.
Lori became obsessed with her newfound vision. She started painting and drawing everything she saw and decided she wanted to be an artist, too.
Because there was no air-conditioning in the house, Rex and Rose Mary left the doors and windows open all night. Every now and then, the family would wake up to a homeless person or drunk off the street sleeping in the living room. Rose Mary said the men were harmless.
Four-year-old Maureen started having nightmares about people coming to get her in the night. Then, one night, ten-year-old Jeannette woke up to a man fondling her. She screamed, and Brian ran to her room carrying a hatchet. The two chased the man out of the house. They followed him into the night and searched through the dark streets. Rex was away, and Rose Mary was fast asleep.
The kids wanted to lock up the house at night after that, but their parents refused. They needed air circulation, and they wouldn’t give in to fear.
Not living in fear was a driving force in Rex’s personality, and he continually tried to impart that feeling in his children. For instance, on another occasion, Rex heard that the city had killed a mountain lion that had wandered into a suburb. He was livid about the dead mountain lion and wanted to prove to his children that wild animals were nothing to be afraid of. He piled the family in the car and drove to the zoo.
Rex took the kids to the cheetah’s cage, where one cheetah stalked back and forth. To prove his point, Rex climbed the fence separating the cheetah’s cage from the observation area. He knelt down next to the cage, and the cheetah walked up and sat on the other side. Rex stuck his hand through the cage and caressed the cheetah’s neck. The animal purred and nuzzled against his hand. He called for the children to join him over the fence, and he placed Jeannette’s hand through the bars and onto the cheetah’s nose. The animal licked her hand in one sloppy motion.
A crowd had formed, and a woman tried to pull Jeannette back over the fence. To avoid any mayhem, Rex and the kids climbed back over, but a security guard was already on his way. Rose Mary was able to talk Rex out of fighting the guard, and the family left the zoo as people pointed and whispered. Jeannette didn’t mind. None of them had ever touched a cheetah.
Rex was kicked out of the electrician’s union after getting fired from not one, but three jobs. The money from the inheritance was long gone, and once again, the family had nothing. Jeannette and her siblings were able to at least get one meal a day at school, and sometimes that’s all they ate.
Around this time, Rose Mary decided that Maureen needed to go to preschool. She was too young to play with her older siblings, and there were no kids her age in their neighborhood. Rose Mary said she didn’t want her youngest wearing worn second-hand clothes, so she made the other three children help her shoplift.
The plan was for Jeannette, Lori, and Brian to create a diversion at the front of the store while Rose Mary shoved dresses under her coat. They stole a handful of dresses for Maureen before a saleswoman became suspicious and they had to stop.
Rex was also coming up with schemes to get money. Whenever they had a little money, he’d put it in the bank. The next day, he’d withdraw all the money from the account inside the bank while Rose Mary withdrew the same amount from the drive-up teller. The technology didn’t update fast enough to register the first withdrawal before the second. Rose Mary said it wasn’t stealing. It was a loan without all the paperwork.
Rex was convinced the mob was behind the electrician’s union. He said he couldn’t get a job until he got rid of organized corruption. To do so, he needed to conduct research, and the best places for research on the mob were mob-owned bars.
His drinking began again in earnest. He started coming home late, drunk, and angry. Rose Mary would hide while the kids tried to get Rex to relax. He’d bust up the house in a fit of rage, then apologize and pass out. Jeannette would clean up the mess, but Rose Mary told her it was Rex’s job to clean it up. But the next morning, he’d wake up and pretend like nothing happened.
On their first Christmas in Phoenix, Rose Mary decided they would celebrate on the actual day instead of a week after, as was their custom. She took the children to the thrift-store, giving them each a dollar for presents. They bought an almost-dead tree and decorated it with Grandma Smith’s antique ornaments.
Rex cracked his first beer Christmas morning and didn’t stop. By the time they were ready for midnight mass, he was fall-down drunk. Rex disrupted the sermon, calling the Virgin Mary a sweet Jewish girl who got pregnant. He said Jesus was the world’s most popular bastard. They were quickly escorted out.
At home, Rex was still belligerent. He opened a gift from Rose Mary: an antique lighter. Swaying drunkenly in front of the tree, Rex said he wanted to really light things up. He held the flame to the tree, which caught immediately. The family grabbed blankets and water. They knocked the tree down and stomped out the fire, breaking many of the ornaments and destroying the presents in the process. Rex laughed through the whole thing.
For Jeannette’s birthday, Rex asked what he could do to make the last years of her childhood special. Jeannette looked into his eyes and told him that her birthday wish was for him to stop drinking.
The next morning, Rex locked himself in the upstairs bedroom and told Jeannette to stay away. Things seemed fine the first day, but by the second, Jeannette heard anguished moans coming from the room. She went inside and saw Rex strapped to the bed with belts and rope. He was writhing under the restraints.
Jeannette filled a jug with water and sat vigil next to the door in case he needed some. She continued this vigil for days, starting after school and ending at bedtime. After a week, the thrashing stopped.
Rex recovered from his detox and spent the next months regaining his strength. He was more relaxed, even reticent with the children. By fall, Rex was back to full strength. He told the family to pack some gear. They were going on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon to celebrate.
The family packed everything they’d need for an extended trip. They didn’t know how long they’d be gone. If all went well, Rex said, they might find a cave and live in it full time.
On the drive out, Rex asked Jeannette how fast she thought he could go. He showed her how fast by pushing their station wagon past one hundred miles per hour. The car shook and sputtered, but Rex didn’t slow down. Finally, the car gave out, and they were stranded.
Rex said if the family walked for eight hours a day, they could cover the eighty-mile hike back to Phoenix in three days. They would have to leave everything behind and come back later. After walking for hours, a blue truck pulled over and picked them up. The driver was an older woman whose daughter had driven by the family earlier and called her mother to help. She brought sodas and sandwiches for everyone, but Rex was too disappointed that the adventure was over to accept his.
When the woman dropped them off in Phoenix, Rex took off. Jeannette stayed up for his return, but he never showed up.
It was three more days before Jeannette and Lori saw Rex stumbling into the house one afternoon. He screamed for Rose Mary, and when she wouldn’t come, he threw the cabinet housing Grandma Smith’s fine china to the ground, shattering everything inside. He dumped a drawer of silver and started throwing utensils around the room.
The kids tried to calm him down, but he shoved them away. He found Rose Mary hiding in the bathtub. They fought physically, and at one point, each grabbed a knife. Rex threw Rose Mary to the ground and got on top of her. After he had her pinned, they both started cracking up. They kissed and made up like nothing had happened.
Now that Rex was back on the bottle, Rose Mary thought it was time to move out east to live near his parents in Welch, West Virginia. She hoped maybe they could get him to stop. Rose Mary said West Virginia would be another grand adventure, but first she needed a car. They’d never retrieved the stranded wagon or any of their stuff from the side of the road.
Along with the house and money, Rose Mary had inherited rights to family land in Texas. A drilling company sent her checks for leasing the land. She used the money to buy a used car.
Rose Mary packed up what little they had left and prepared to leave a day after buying the car. Once again, each child was allowed to bring one thing, and it couldn’t be their bikes. There was no time to inform the school or get the children’s records. She said they didn’t need records. Their reading abilities would prove how smart they were.
She also didn’t make any arrangements for the house. Rose Mary didn’t want people living in the house, and it felt good to own something, so she wasn’t going to sell it. She hung laundry on the line as a decoy in case anyone noticed the house was empty.
On the morning of their departure, Rex sulked in the house. He was going to wander the desert and would not be making the trip with them. But when the children begged him to come, he climbed into the driver’s seat.
It took the Walls family a month to make it across the country when Jeannette was around eleven years old. The used car Rose Mary bought broke down frequently and wouldn’t go faster than twenty miles per hour. Finally, they rolled into the Appalachian Mountains.
The landscape was vastly different than anything Jeannette had ever seen. Instead of deserts and dry hills, they drove through rolling hills of thick forests. They pulled up to Rex’s childhood home and were greeted by their other grandma for the first time.
Grandma Erma was an obese woman who smoked and drank almost as much as Rex. She greeted her son warmly, but she was rude to Rose Mary and short with the children. She told them to call her Erma, not grandma. In contrast, Grandpa Ted was old and wiry. He didn’t mind being called grandpa. Another man stepped forward and introduced himself as Uncle Stanley. He was missing teeth and was overly affectionate with Jeannette.
That night, everyone gathered around the coal stove for warmth and ate green beans and biscuits for dinner. The beans were mushy and so salty, Jeannette held her nose as she ate, as Rose Mary had taught her to do when eating food that was slightly spoiled. Erma smacked her hand away and told her beggars couldn’t be choosers.
The family wasn’t planning on staying with Rex’s parents for long. But until they could afford their own place, they all slept in the basement—Rex and Rose Mary on a pullout sofa and the children sharing Stanley’s bed. The children giggled at being crammed in so tightly together, eliciting a stern warning from Erma that laughing got on her nerves.
The next day, Rex took Rose Mary and the kids on a tour of Welch. Welch was a coal-mining town that sat in a valley between two mountain ranges. A river ran through town, but it was polluted from the town’s toilet waste because there was no sewer system. There was one main road, and everything seemed to be covered in coal dust.
As they drove through town, Jeannette tried to make friendly gestures to people she saw on the street, but none of them smiled back. Rose Mary seemed giddy. She reckoned there were no other artists in Welch. Her career could really take off there.
Rose Mary walked Brian and Jeannette to the local elementary school the next morning. She explained to the principal that they’d forgotten their records but assured him they were both bright students. When the principal asked Jeannette what eight times seven was, she couldn’t understand his hillbilly accent. Rose Mary translated, and Jeannette shouted the answer. Similarly, the principal didn’t understand her accent. He said the children seemed slow and had speech problems, so he placed them in classes for kids with learning disabilities.
The school was a far cry from Emerson in Phoenix. There was no playground equipment or free bananas. The winter winds were already whirling through. Rose Mary had purchased used winter coats, but Jeannette’s didn’t have any buttons. As they waited outside for the morning bell, she wrapped her arms around her front to keep the coat closed.
On Jeannette’s first day of fifth grade, her English teacher placed a target on her back. She loudly announced to the class that Jeannette thought she was better than everyone because she had enrolled in school without records. The teacher led the class in mocking Jeannette and laughing at her, and a tall black girl stabbed her in the back with a sharp pencil.
All Erma had given Jeannette for lunch was two slices of bread with a smear of lard in the middle. She ate it by herself slowly so she wouldn’t have to go outside and play. Finally, after all the other kids were gone, the janitor told her she had to leave.
Once outside, the black girl from class and a few others taunted Jeannette and made fun of her buttonless coat. They punched and kicked her until it was time to go inside.
Every day for weeks, the black girl, Dinitia, and her friends bullied Jeannette. They called her poor, dirty, and ugly and beat her up at recess. Jeannette only had three dresses, and Erma only let the children bathe once a week from a bucket of warm water they all had to use.
One day, Jeannette was walking through a park when she came upon a wild dog cornering a young black boy. She shouted at the child, no more than six years old, not to run, but he did anyway. The dog chased him and knocked him down. Jeannette saw that the dog wasn’t really wild or a threat, just mangy and abused.
She picked up a stick and threatened the dog until he ran away. Then, she gave the boy a piggyback ride to his house. When she reached his home, she dropped the boy off and saw Dinitia watching her from across the street.
The next day at school, Dinitia didn’t bother Jeannette at lunch. Without her leadership, the other girls left Jeannette alone, too. A few days later, Dinitia asked if Jeannette would help her with their English assignment. She thanked her for bringing the boy home but never said a word about beating her up. Still, Jeannette was pleased with the turn of events.
The girls made a plan to meet at Dinitia’s house that weekend to study, since Erma was extremely racist. That night, Erma was cooking beans in the kitchen when Jeannette got home. She asked how her day was with the n-words. Jeannette was used to Erma using that word, but she also knew it was wrong. Rex and Rose Mary had taught her that much. Jeannette usually ignored Erma’s racist remarks, but it bothered her today. When she yelled at Erma and told her not to use that word, Erma banished her to the basement without supper.
On a cold winter’s morning, Rex and Rose Mary drove away from Erma’s house and headed back to Phoenix. They wanted to pick up the rest of their stuff and get the children’s school records. Jeannette could tell both her parents were excited to be leaving.
Jeannette wondered if her parents would come back. Now that the children were older, she feared they’d become too big a burden. A week past and her parents were still gone. Erma was more critical and mean without Rex around and hit the kids with a wooden spoon. One day, she called Brian into her room to mend his pants. She’d been drinking all morning from a bottle she kept in her housecoat. After a minute, Jeannette heard Brian squirming and whining. She ran to the room and saw Brian crying and Erma on her knees molesting his privates.
Jeannette screamed for her to stop, and Lori came running in. Erma scolded Jeannette and reached back to slap her, but Lori stopped her arm and tried to calm things down. After Erma slapped Lori, the two got into a fist fight, and Lori punched Erma in the face.
After that, the children weren’t allowed to come out of the basement. They weren’t allowed to use the bathroom upstairs, so they had to go at school or outside. When a snowstorm hit, Erma wouldn’t give them coal for the basement stove. Whenever they weren’t at school, all four kids piled under the covers in their clothes and coats to stay warm.
When Rex and Rose Mary returned, Erma told them what had happened. Rex stomped down the stairs and went into a tirade about disrespecting their grandmother. He said Brian should stop being such a sissy. The children wondered if Erma had ever done something like that to Rex. None of them wanted to think about it, but they all agreed it would explain a lot.
Jeannette thought things would get better with her parents back, but Erma wouldn’t forgive the kids. She kicked all of them out. With no jobs, no money, and no car (it had broken down on the drive back from Phoenix), Rex set out to find something cheap in town. What they ended up finding was a ramshackle wooden house on the side of a steep hill. The front of the house sat on cinder blocks, and there was no indoor plumbing.
There was an old black coal stove in one of the three rooms that vented through a window instead of a chimney. The ventilation was poor, and part of the ceiling was stained from the thick smoke. The kitchen had exposed and shoddy wiring around the appliances, and when they were able to pay the electric bill, at least one of them was shocked if they touched some wet or metallic. They wore rags or socks over their hands to avoid it. There was also a leak in the ceiling that grew so much during a rainstorm, part of the ceiling came down. No one fixed it.
Jeannette longed for their house in Phoenix, as well as the dry, sunny weather. She asked Rex if they were ever going home, to which he responded they were home. Rex loved the house, not for the current dwelling, but because of the included land, on which he planned to build the Glass Castle.
Rex had roped off the parcel of land on which the Glass Castle would be built. He wanted to break ground and get started right away, but he was never home. So every day for a month, Jeannette and Brian dug the hole for the Glass Castle. They dug a big enough hole for Rex to smooth out and pour the foundation into.
Rex couldn’t afford to pay for trash pickup, so the family started throwing their trash in the hole. Rex said it was temporary, that he would borrow a truck to haul the trash heap to the dump. But the garbage was never removed.
The pile of garbage attracted numerous rodents. One day, Jeannette found a giant rat rolling around in a punch bowl filled with sugar—Rose Mary had a severe sweet tooth. Jeannette and Brian tried to get rid of the rat, but their efforts failed. A few nights later, Maureen woke up to the rat sitting inches from her face. The children tried to kill it, but it was their dog—a stray who’d followed Brian home—who caught it and killed it on their bedroom floor.
Rose Mary and Rex didn’t think much of the rat incident. When the garbage pit got too full, they told the kids to make it bigger.
Rex’s drinking had continued since his short stint of sobriety in Phoenix, but the longer the family was in Welch, the worse his behavior became. One night, Jeannette found Rex in the living room cut and bleeding. There was a gash on his head that went to the bone. Jeannette cleaned the wound but couldn’t dress it because of his hair.
There was an equally severe cut on his arm, and Rex told Jeannette to grab the sewing box. He produced a needle and some cotton thread and told her to stitch up the wound. After her protests were ignored, Jeannette tried to make the first stitch, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Rex took her hand and guided the needle through his arm twice. After two stitches, he told her she’d done a wonderful job.
When Jeannette came home from school the next day, Rex was already gone. Being gone had become the standard for Rex. He’d leave and not come home for days. Jeannette always wanted to believe his excuses about investigating the miners union or researching his latest get-rich-quick scheme. He’d abandoned the idea of finding gold, but he was working on a system to burn low-grade coal more efficiently.
Jeannette listened with hope as Rex explained why he was too busy or too proud to take the jobs people offered. But each time he came home after days of disappearing, she found it harder to believe in him. At least he brought groceries when he came back, and eventually she stopped asking where he’d been.
The only time there was food in the house was when Rex managed to make it home and Rose Mary received a check from the Texas land. The money she received was enough to stock the pantry for days to weeks at a time.
The family ate pinto beans day after day until they ran out. Sometimes they’d have popcorn for dinner if that was all the food left. When the checks were big enough, Rose Mary would buy a large canned ham, and they’d feast on thick slices. Because there was no refrigerator, the ham would spoil on the counter. One day, Jeannette went to cut a slice and found it infested with maggots. Rose Mary was eating a slice. She told Jeannette she shouldn’t be so picky and to just cut around the maggots.
When the money ran out, they’d go without food for lengthy periods. Jeannette and Brian foraged whatever they could find, like fruit from trees, but it wasn’t enough. The children were so thin, the kids at school made fun of them. Jeannette hid in the bathroom at lunch and waited for girls to throw their lunch bags away. She rifled through the garbage, amazed at how much food other kids wasted, and took her spoils into the stall to eat. She was sure Brian was subsisting in the same way, but they never spoke of it.
On the contrary, Maureen was well fed. She had made a number of neighborhood friends and often wandered to their house for dinner. Somehow, Rose Mary seemed to be gaining weight.
One night, Rose Mary and the children were in the main room trying not to think about how hungry they were. Rose Mary was on the sofa bed and kept dipping below the blankets. When Brian caught her chewing, she said she was just moving her jaw around because her teeth hurt. Brian pulled back the blankets to find a family-sized chocolate bar half-eaten.
Rose Mary pleaded for forgiveness. She said she was addicted to sugar like Rex was addicted to alcohol. They always forgave Rex, so they should forgive her. Brian separated the remaining chocolate into equal pieces for the four kids, and they ate it in front of Rose Mary.
Winter was harsh the year Jeannette was in sixth grade. She still only had the coat without buttons and was constantly cold, even in the house. Rose Mary said they didn’t have money to buy coal for the stove, so Jeannette and Brian walked the streets collecting pieces of coal and wood.
Most of the heat was rising through the holes in the roof, and icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling. Rose Mary said they were lucky to at least have each other, but the kids didn’t feel lucky. They fought over the dogs, who could keep them warm in bed. Brian had a pet iguana that he slept with on his chest to keep it warm. But he woke up one morning to a frozen lizard. The only time the children were warm was when they went to school.
When the snow thawed on warmer days, the wood became soggy and useless. The kids squirted the fuel from the kerosene lamps to cajole the wood to light. Rex thought it was cheating to use fuel, but he didn’t provide any alternatives. The kerosene worked for a while until, one night, the fire exploded while Lori stoked it. The flames burned the front of her hair and body. Jeannette and Brian packed snow on her legs, but she still had burn blisters for weeks.
At the end of their second winter in Welch, Erma died of cirrhosis. Rex slipped into a deeper state of despair and stayed out even longer than before. After four or so days, Rose Mary would send Jeannette to find him.
Jeannette went from one bar to the next until she found him. One time, Rex was in the seediest bar in town and too drunk to function. The other patrons helped throw in him the back of some man’s truck, and he drove Jeannette and Rex back home.
Shortly after Erma’s death, Uncle Stanley burned their house down after falling asleep with a cigarette. He and his father moved to a small apartment in town. The apartment had indoor plumbing, and the children would bathe there on weekends.
Jeannette was waiting for her turn in the bath one afternoon while watching television with Stanley. His hand started to move up her thigh, and she saw that he was masturbating. Rose Mary was in the other room. When Jeannette ran to tell her what was happening, Rose Mary said it was sad how lonely Stanley was, and besides, sexual assault is all about perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. Jeannette stopped going to the apartment to bathe.
Rose Mary never seemed concerned about the condition of the house or the children. When spring rains flooded the outdoor toilet, her solution was to put a plastic bucket in a corner to use as a restroom. The house was so damp, mold and mushrooms grew in corners, and the porch started to fall apart.
One day, Brian and Jeannette found a two-carat diamond ring (likely belonging to the senile old woman who’d lived there) in the bottom of an old piece of wood. They wanted to sell it to pay off the mortgage and buy food. Rose Mary wanted to keep the ring to replace the one Rex had pawned and improve her self-esteem, which was more important than food.
Jeannette knew her mother’s mood needed lifting. Rose Mary spent days in bed, crying and lamenting that the children had squashed her art career. Then, a week later, she’d be up again, painting like everything was wonderful. But things weren’t wonderful, and Jeannette, now twelve, decided to start taking measures into her own hands. She researched how other families in the area got by and discovered a solution.
One day, she told Rose Mary that things needed to change. They hadn’t had anything but popcorn for the last few days. Rose Mary told Jeannette she was always so critical and negative. She complained that Jeannette never blamed Rex for anything, but Jeannette was ready for this line of defense. She told Rose Mary that she had to leave Rex.
Jeannette still wanted to believe in Rex and support him, but she could see the destruction he was bringing to his life and, by proxy, theirs. If Rose Mary left Rex, she’d become eligible for government assistance. Without a man around, the family could get food stamps and clothing certificates. The government would pay for coal and hot school lunches.
It was well known that Rex and Rose Mary didn’t believe in welfare. They’d even given back a bag of clothes from the local church because they didn’t accept charity. Rose Mary’s stance on this day was no different. She said welfare would create a shame they would never be able to shake. It would ruin their lives forever.
Jeannette said if she wouldn’t accept charity, she needed to get a job. She could teach and bring in enough of a salary to move them to a nicer place. Rose Mary thought about it, then said she was fine where she was. She was an excitement junkie, after all.
A year later, Jeannette was alone in the house when a knock came at the door. She cracked it open and saw an official-looking man on the porch with a folder under one arm. He said he was from child welfare, and they’d received a complaint from someone about child neglect in the home. He said it was his department’s job to investigate.
Jeannette was furious at whoever had called child welfare. If they deemed their family unfit, she and her siblings would be separated into different foster homes. She pulled the door almost shut so he couldn’t see inside. She told him that Rex worked all the time and was an entrepreneur developing a system for burning low-grade coal. She said Rose Mary was an artist and teacher and that everything was fine. The man gave her a business card and left.
When Rose Mary came home, Jeannette turned her anger toward her. Because neither of her parents would get jobs or accept charity, the government was going to split up the family. Rose Mary sat at her easel and began to paint. When she was finished, she said she’d get a job. The picture she painted was of a woman drowning in a lake.
The child welfare man never came back, but his visit was enough to force Rose Mary back into teaching. She was hired immediately in an elementary school in Davey, a few miles north of Welch. She had to carpool with another teacher, an unpleasant woman named Lucy. Whenever Rose Mary got out of the car, Lucy sprayed Lysol on the passenger seat.
Rose Mary’s teaching performance was the same in Davey as it had been in Battle Mountain. She was lax about grading and discipline, and she had to be coerced to even go to school. Some mornings, she would hide in bed refusing to go like a child. The kids would drag her out and get her ready before Lucy became impatient and left her behind.
Despite her antics, Rose Mary was making money, and her paycheck was a blessing to the household. On payday, they’d cash the check and pay off the monthly bills. Rose Mary put space heaters and a refrigerator on layaway and paid a little each month. They’d stock up on groceries and have enough money left over to survive the rest of the month.
But soon the food was gone, and so was the money. Jeannette could never get a straight answer from Rose Mary about where the money went. She knew Rose Mary had to buy little gifts for herself, things she said made you feel rich, like crystal vases. But even accounting for those splurges, there should have been money left over. Jeannette and Lori came up with a budget and tried to persuade Rose Mary to let them handle the finances, but she refused. By the end of each month, Jeannette was back to digging in garbage cans for lunch.
Life changed for Jeannette when she entered Welch High School as a seventh grader. She wanted to belong to a club where people would accept her. She thought about track, but Rose Mary wouldn’t pay for the uniform, so she started working for the school newspaper, The Maroon Wave.
The faculty advisor was Jeannette’s namesake, Miss Jeanette Bivens. She was so old, she’d been Rex’s English teacher, as well. Miss Bivens was the first person to push Rex in a positive direction. She believed in his talents as a writer and convinced him to enter a poem into a competition. The poem won first prize. When Rex suggested naming their second child after her, Rose Mary added the extra “n” to make it more French.
Jeannette started as a proofreader. She spent her nights going over copy at the Welch Daily News offices, where the school paper was printed, which were always warm and buzzing with activity. The training she’d had grading her mother’s papers paid off, and she was good at the work.
Even though Jeannette was surrounded by adults, she was still bullied. One woman complained that she was dirty and smelly. She feared Jeannette would infect everyone with head lice. Miss Bivens went to bat for Jeannette and said she could stay in the workroom if she kept herself clean. Jeannette started going back to her grandpa’s apartment to bathe, steering clear of Stanley.
The fast pace of the newsroom appealed to Jeannette, especially the life of a reporter. She saw how they ran out whenever something came over the police scanner and came back with a story. She’d see it in the next day’s paper, and it seemed like freedom and connection.
The reporters were in touch with what was happening in the real world. They formed life into bits of information that expanded the minds of readers. Her only outlet for information about the world was the biased ravings of her parents about politics and society. Until Jeannette worked at the paper, she’d never been privy to current events or the lives of others elsewhere.
Reading the wire service was like discovering reality for the first time. The world suddenly made sense, and she wanted to be someone who knew what was going on and made sense of it for others.
Maureen had a hard time finding a place in her family. She was spending so much time with her friends and their families, Jeannette felt like she was becoming removed from her real family. Unlike her siblings, Maureen loved it in Welch. Her friends’ families thought she needed protecting and did their best to save her. They were religious families, and Maureen was frequently baptized. She was even attending pentecostal meetings with snake-handlers.
To keep Maureen included in the Walls family, Jeannette and her siblings tried to show her special attention. They bought her a child’s kitchen set for her seventh birthday with money they’d saved up from paper routes and lawn work. They told her stories about life in California when she was a baby. They tried to talk to Rose Mary about her increasing religious zealousness, but Rose Mary said everyone was free to find their own way to heaven.
Jeannette was growing impatient with Rose Mary’s indifference to everything. She still had manic mood swings and frequently preferred to hunker down in bed instead of going to work. Toward the end of the school year, Rose Mary revealed that the program she’d been hired to teach was shutting down because she hadn’t completed the assessment work. She sobbed in bed and complained about hating her life.
Jeannette was disgusted with her mother, but Lori defended her. Lori understood how hard it must be to be married to a man like Rex. Jeannette said their mother could handle their father just fine if she were a stronger woman. She was sure all Rose Mary had to do was put her foot down, but Jeannette would learn that those words were easier said than done.
Rose Mary left home for eight weeks during the summer break to update her teaching certificate in Charleston. Lori was also gone at a summer camp for gifted students she’d been accepted into. At thirteen, Jeannette was in charge at home. Rose Mary had given her two hundred dollars for bills and supplies, and Jeannette put together a budget. She added whatever she could make babysitting to their stipend. If she was frugal, she could make it work.
The first time Rex asked for money was a week after Rose Mary left. He said he needed five dollars for beer and cigarettes. Five dollars could buy food for her, Brian, and Maureen for two days. She wanted to say no, but she couldn’t. She was angry at herself for caving, but she was livid at her father for taking advantage of their special bond.
Rex asked for another five dollars a few days later, and again Jeannette caved. When he asked for twenty dollars after another few days, she finally protested. She had bills to pay and kids to feed. Rex said he didn’t need to explain himself to his teenage daughter. He said he’d pay her back and asked if he’d ever let her down. For the first time, she wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t. She gave him the money.
Rex showed up a few days later and said he needed Jeannette’s help to get the money he owed her. He picked out a dress for her and drove her to a bar in a nearby town. Rex ordered Jeannette a beer and went to play pool. A man sat down next to her and asked her to dance. He assumed she was seventeen, and Jeannette didn’t correct him.
Jeannette didn’t feel comfortable with the man’s arms around her, but she couldn’t help but enjoy the attention. The last person to like her was Billy Deel. She figured this man was after the same thing Billy was, but her father was there and didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he offered to play the man in a game of pool.
For the next few hours, Rex hustled the man in pool. Between each game, the man danced with Jeannette, becoming more handsy the more he drank. After the man lost a sizable sum to Rex, he turned to Jeannette and said they should go upstairs, as though he was owed something. Jeannette didn’t want to go, but when Rex told the man it was OK, she figured it was safe. Her father wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. When they reached the apartment, there were two other men watching TV. They leered at Jeannette.
The man put on a record and started dancing aggressively with Jeannette. When she resisted, he pushed her to the bed and kissed her, the men on the couch egging him on. He pinned her hands above her head. She thought about screaming for help, but her anger at Rex kept her from calling to him. To deter his advances, Jeannette opened the front of her dress and showed the man the mottled scars across her chest. The man hesitated, and she ran out.
On the drive home, Rex handed Jeannette the forty dollars he owed her. He said they made a great team, but Jeannette felt more like one of his marks. She told Rex what the man tried to do, but Rex said he knew she could manage a little groping. It was the same lesson as that day at the spring. Sink or swim. She always found a way to swim.
Over the summer, Jeannette got a full taste of what Rose Mary was up against. Rex tried to get Jeannette to go to another bar with him, but she refused. He got mad and said if she didn’t want to help him, she had to give him money.
The summer stipend was running out fast, so Jeannette decided to take the advice she’d been giving her mother for years. She put on a pair of Rose Mary’s heels and make-up and walked down to main street. She pretended to be seventeen and was hired to work as a jewelry store clerk for forty dollars a week.
The owner of the jewelry store was Mr. Becker, a large man who sometimes rubbed up against Jeannette while they worked. Mr. Becker didn’t trust Jeannette. Whenever he left the store, he took the key to the diamond ring display. If he ever forgot the key, he conspicuously counted each ring in front of her.
Jeannette was annoyed with these not-so-subtle clues about his feelings regarding her character. It hadn’t even crossed her mind to steal anything until he made a big show of not trusting her. She wanted to get back at him, and after finding out he was cheating her out of commissions, she decided to steal a watch.
Mr. Becker never counted any other items but the rings, so when he left the store one day, Jeannette slipped a watch into her purse. At first, the watch made her excited. But she couldn’t wear it, not without raising suspicion. The more she thought about the consequences of being found out, such as reform school or juvenile detention, the more anxious she felt. When Mr. Becker went out a week later, she slipped the watch back in the case, her hands shaking.
Lori and Rose Mary returned home late that summer. Lori was like a new person. At camp, she was just like all the other kids—fed, showered, artistic, and full of youth. It was the first time Lori had felt normal, and she realized that if she left Welch, she could live a normal life.
Rose Mary was also caught up in a dizzy glee. She’d loved her time away and said she was done living her life for other people. It was time she started living for herself. She was quitting her teaching job to paint full time.
Jeannette argued that they needed her salary to survive, but Rose Mary said she was tired of always being the one who had to work. The kids could work if they wanted money. She had more important things to do. Still, Jeannette thought she was bluffing, but when school started, Rose Mary refused to get out of bed. She pouted and said she didn’t feel well. Jeannette was furious. She told her mother to get over it and act like a mother. Rose Mary’s whining turned to anger. Jeannette was being disrespectful, and Rex would teach her a lesson when he got home.
After what had happened that summer, Jeannette knew Rex owed her and wasn’t worried about being punished. But when she got home from school, Rex yelled that she better show her mother some respect. Jeannette yelled that neither of them deserved her respect. Rex threatened to beat her if she didn’t apologize, but she stood her ground. She expected Rex to back down. He’d never risk their relationship by beating her. But Rex took off his belt and smacked the back of her thighs six times.
Jeannette ran from the house and wandered the woods for hours. She made two decisions that day. The first was that no one would ever lay a hand on her again, and the second was that she was going to leave Welch, like Lori wanted to. She decided she would save up all her money between now and the end of high school, then leave and never come back.
One day, two filmmakers from New York City arrived in Welch as part of a cultural appreciation tour. Lori showed them some of her drawings, and they said she had real talent. If she wanted to be a serious artist, she should move to New York and go to art school.
The description of New York City as a land of misfits appealed to Lori and Jeannette, who had never truly belonged anywhere. The girls made a plan. Lori would leave for New York as soon as she graduated and get settled. Jeannette would join her as soon as she could. They merged whatever money they could save to help Lori get an apartment.
Jeannette wasn’t working at the jewelry store anymore, but she was babysitting, tutoring kids, and doing their homework for a fee. Lori started commissioning personalized posters for students. She had a knack for artistic writing and design, and she sold them for $1.50 each. Word of mouth spread so fast, she had more orders than she could handle.
The girls told Brian about their plan, and even though he was younger and couldn’t be included, he donated his landscaping earnings to the plastic piggy bank they’d named Oz. They hid Oz in their room and didn’t tell anyone about the money.
As Lori’s graduation date zoomed into view, Jeannette was consumed with visions of what life would be like for them in New York. Lori, on the other hand, was scared. She’d made it to the final round of the National Merit Scholarships, but to take the test, she had to hitchhike to a nearby town. A truck driver got fresh, and she was too rattled to perform well. With no scholarship, art school was still just an empty dream.
Then, Lori discovered that a literary group was giving a scholarship to the student who created the best artistic representation of a literary icon. For a full week, Lori created a bust of William Shakespeare that was almost life-like.
The night she was finishing the bust, everyone cheered her on. Rex stumbled in later, drunk and surly. He told Lori that Shakespeare was a phony and hadn’t written any of his plays. He took one look at the bust, then used his thumb to wipe off Shakespeare’s lying mouth. He said he would help her write a paper exposing Shakespeare as a fraud that would set the literary world on fire.
Lori was broken. She didn’t have the heart to fix the bust and smashed it into a blob of clay.
Lori and Jeannette decided Lori would still move, even if she hadn’t found a school to attend. She’d work and figure it out along the way.
As usual, Rex didn’t understand why everyone was so bent out of shape about the bust. He said he wasn’t trying to ruin Lori’s plans for New York, but he added that she was a fool for wanting to go. She’d end up living on the streets, becoming a drug addict, and working as a prostitute. When everyone ignored him, he said he didn’t know why he even bothered to come home.
By the time Lori’s graduation came around, the three kids had saved up nine months of earnings. Jeannette came home to add her recent babysitting pay to Oz and found it smashed open. The money was gone. She couldn’t believe Rex would be so low as to steal his children’s money. When Lori found out, she cried, defeated.
Lori waited up all night to confront Rex, but he never came home. It was another three nights before he stumbled in. The children confronted him about the money, but he denied it. He threw a few dollars on the ground and passed out. Lori was hopeless. There was no way she could leave without money, but Jeannette wasn’t giving up. If Lori never got out, they would all be stuck in Welch forever.
One of the families Jeannette babysat for was moving to Iowa over the summer. They offered her two hundred dollars at the end of summer and a bus ticket back to Welch if she came and looked after their children.
Although the kids had started saving again, they only had $37.20 by the time Lori graduated. Jeannette knew the money from babysitting all summer would help, but she knew it would help Lori more emotionally. She asked the woman if she would take Lori to Iowa, and instead of buying her a ticket back to Welch, she could buy her a ticket to New York City.
The morning that Lori left, everyone stood outside as she packed one box full of clothes, art supplies, and books into the Iowa-bound station wagon. She hugged everyone goodbye and promised to write. She didn’t say goodbye to Rex, who watched from the porch with a cigarette. She hadn’t spoken to him since the piggy bank incident. As the car pulled away, Lori didn’t look back. Rex said the family was falling apart, and Jeannette happily agreed.
Jeannette became the news editor of The Maroon Wave her sophomore year. She borrowed a camera Rose Mary had bought to photograph her artwork and started taking pictures at all the school events. Where once she was an outcast, the popular kids now accepted her and welcomed the opportunity to smile for the camera in the hopes of making it into the paper.
Working on the Wave gave Jeannette plenty of reasons to stay out of her house. She stayed after school every day to work on stories, lay out the copy, and finalize each issue. She stayed in the newsroom during lunch, finally finding a legitimate reason for why she wasn’t eating. When everyone was gone after school, she’d sneak into the lunch room and rifle through the cafeteria garbage. She rarely went hungry after that.
By her junior year, Jeannette was editor in chief. She wrote many articles herself and started a campaign to increase circulation.
Rex didn’t believe in much, and there were few people he respected. But one person served as a sort of hero to him: Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly a plane faster than the speed of sound. Chuck was a West Virginia native and was coming to talk at Welch High School.
Rex was floored that Jeannette was going to get to interview Chuck Yeager for the newspaper. He gave her a crash course in aviation history and wrote up more than twenty questions she could ask during the interview. Chuck was impressed with Jeannette’s knowledge and questions. They talked for almost an hour, and afterward, Jeannette was the talk of the school.
Rex was so excited to hear how the interview had gone, he stayed sober until Jeannette came home. He offered to help her write her article.
Lori had found a hotel for women in the West Village and was loving life. She waitressed at a German restaurant and took art classes. She’d met other artists who were just like her: strange and driven. She wrote home often and told Jeannette she was going to love the city.
Jeannette had been working on her escape plan all through junior year. She’d graduate, move in with Lori, go to a city college, and work for one of the news wires. She reached out to the school guidance counselor, Miss Katona, for suggestions on schools to apply to.
Miss Katona was a Welch native and thought the idea of leaving Welch was ridiculous. She advised Jeannette to attend a state school thirty miles away. She said Jeannette wouldn’t want to move away from her family and friends. Besides, she’d have to pay out-of-state tuition if she went to school in New York.
On the walk home, Jeannette wondered if she could get in-state tuition if she moved to New York after junior year instead of graduation. What was there to stay for? Nothing she did made life any better, and things at home had gotten worse over the last year. By the time she arrived home, it was decided. She was moving at the end of the school year.
When Jeannette told her parents of her new plan, Rex climbed out the back window, which had become the only way in or out of the house after the front stairs to the porch collapsed. Rose Mary grew despondent, and Jeannette said she’d write all the time. But Rose Mary wasn’t sad about Jeannette leaving, she was jealous. It wasn’t fair that she was stuck in Welch.
Shortly after Jeannette revealed her new plan, Rex walked into the house with the blueprints for the Glass Castle. He’d barely said a word to Jeannette since her announcement. Now, he wanted to show her his new plans for her room. Rex said she could graduate high school, go to the state school nearby, and work at the Welch Daily News. They could all live in the Glass Castle together.
Jeannette told Rex that he was never going to build the Glass Castle. Even if he eventually did, she would be in New York. She was leaving home in three months, even if she had to walk. If he wanted to build the Glass Castle, that was fine, but she wouldn’t be living in it.
Rose Mary gave Jeannette an old suitcase for her trip. She only packed clothes and her portfolio of articles from the Wave. Jeannette didn’t want to bring anything from her old life, including her favorite geode she’d had since Battle Mountain. She gave it to Maureen.
Jeannette’s bus was leaving at seven in the morning. Neither she nor Brian could sleep the night before. Brian stated an hourly countdown until her departure in the darkness of night, and the two laughed until there were only two hours left.
Rose Mary wasn’t going to the station with Jeannette. She said she didn’t like to get up early. Rex hadn’t come home at all. But when Jeannette climbed out the window with her suitcase, she saw him waiting outside. At the bus station, Rex gave her his favorite knife for protection. Jeannette gave him a hug, the softness of his cheek telling her he’d shaved for the occasion.
As the bus pulled away, Jeannette didn’t want to look back, but she felt the pull of her father. She waved and he waved back. She wondered if watching her leave reminded him of when he’d left home at seventeen. She wondered if he was hoping she would fail and have to come home or if he was hoping that, unlike him, she’d leave Welch for good.
Jeannette woke up in the early morning hours her first night in New York and thought the city was on fire. She was staying with Lori at the women’s hostel. When she asked Lori about the fire the next morning, she learned it was just the city lights reflecting off the smog.
Jeannette found a job waitressing at a hamburger restaurant that paid her eighty dollars a week. She loved the crowds, the fast-paced activity of the staff, the discount on meals. Every day, she ate a cheeseburger with a milkshake.
The girls soon found an apartment in a less-expensive part of the Bronx. The whole of their Welch home could fit into the apartment, and for the first time, they had working appliances, like a refrigerator, gas stove, an indoor bathroom, and a bathtub. Although the apartment had nice furnishings, the neighborhood left a little to be desired. But rough neighborhoods were nothing new. Jeannette was mugged several times on her way home, but she always fought back.
To finish her last year of high school, Jeannette enrolled in a public school where the students worked at internships instead of attending classes. Jeannette took an internship at a low-budget Brooklyn-run paper called The Phoenix.
At first, she worked mostly as an office assistant, but after a number of reporters quit because the owner, Mike, couldn’t pay them, Jeannette was hired as a full-time reporter. She quit her waitressing gig and went to work at eighteen years old. The Phoenix was everything Jeannette had hoped for back in Welch. She was always on the go, always getting calls about stories. She worked ninety-hour weeks and made $125 a week.
Jeannette was so happy with her job, she no longer thought it necessary to go to college. She was gaining real-world experience, and if she was asked about or overheard something she didn’t know, like fashion or being Kosher, she would look it up.
One day, someone mentioned something about the Progressive Era during an interview, and Jeannette had to look it up in the encyclopedia when she returned to the office. Mike suggested she might enjoy college so she could learn all the things she didn’t know. He added that a college degree would help her land a better job. He said she was always welcome at The Phoenix if she ever wanted to come back.
Jeannette and Brian had been corresponding through letters since she left. Although life was moving forward for her and Lori, things in Welch were getting increasingly worse.
Rex was always drunk except when he was thrown in jail for a night. Rose Mary was successful at living for herself and was more or less withdrawn from the family. Maureen was practically living at her friends’ homes. And Brian was sleeping underneath an inflatable raft because the roof in their bedroom had collapsed from water damage.
Jeannette and Lori wondered if Brian would like the city. He was comfortable in the outdoors and never seemed to have a problem with Welch. Also, unlike the girls, Brian had friends. But after Jeannette called and told him about the apartment and the ease of finding work, Brian was convinced. He took the same bus to New York City the day after his junior year of high school. He started working at an ice cream parlor close to The Phoenix offices, and at night, he’d wait for Jeannette to finish her work so they could go home together.
Lori wanted Maureen to move to New York, too, but Maureen was only twelve years old. Lori said she would take care of her and make sure she went to school. When Lori told Maureen her plan, Maureen was thrilled. Rose Mary was also thrilled, but Rex accused Lori of stealing his family and said she was no longer his daughter.
One winter day, Maureen walked off the same bus from Welch and moved into Lori’s apartment. Brian was living in Midtown Manhattan by this point, and with his address, they found a good school for Maureen to attend.
With all the children together again, they organized weekend dinners at Lori and Maureen’s. They’d make big feasts and reminisced about their crazy life in Welch.
Jeannette applied to and was accepted by Barnard College, the female equivalent of the all-male Columbia University. She was able to pay most of her tuition with loans and grants, but she had to make up the rest herself. She took a secretarial job on Wall Street.
Without a full-time job, Jeannette couldn’t afford to pay rent at the apartment with Lori and Brian. She started working as a part-time nanny for a psychologist on the Upper West Side in exchange for housing. She orchestrated her schedule so she could attend classes two days a week and work at an art gallery on weekends for extra cash.
She’d joined the college’s newspaper, but after getting hired by a large magazine group as an editorial assistant, she quit. The magazine was legitimate and well-known, and she worked with real journalists who’d written books, interviewed presidents, and followed other prestigious stories. Jeannette felt like she’d made it to the big time.
Three years after moving to New York, Jeannette heard a strange story on the morning radio news. A van had stalled on the New Jersey Turnpike, creating a headache for the morning commute. Clothes and furniture had fallen from the van and were strewn about, and a dog was running wild among the traffic jam. Jeannette thought it was a strange story but forgot about it.
That night, Rose Mary called Jeannette and said she and Rex had moved to New York. Jeannette knew right away that the people from the van were none other than her parents. Jeannette didn’t join in Rose Mary’s glee about the news. She was used to being on her own and didn’t want any interference. Even so, she went to Lori’s to see them the following day.
Rex and Rose Mary spoke a mile a minute about their trip to New York and their adventures during the day. All of the kids were there, but none of them joined in the merriment. When Brian asked why they’d moved to New York, Rex thought it was a silly question. Obviously, they’d come to be a family again.
Rex and Rose Mary bounced from one cheap room to another their first few months in New York. They either couldn’t pay the rent or caused too much trouble. Brian wouldn’t let them stay with him, believing they needed to figure things out on their own. But Lori, who by now lived in an apartment in Brian’s building, let them move in with her and Maureen.
The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but after four months, Rex and Rose Mary were still at Lori’s, and the apartment was starting to look like their house in Welch. Rose Mary cluttered the apartment with artwork and treasures collected from the street. Despite turning her apartment into a junkyard, Lori’s annoyance was more at her father than her mother.
Rex was still the same Rex he’d always been. He somehow always had money for alcohol, didn’t have a job, and came home late at night drunk and ready to fight. To help ease the burden on Lori, Brian finally took Rex in. Brian locked up all the alcohol in the house in a cabinet, but Rex broke in and consumed everything the first week he was there. When Brian told Rex he couldn’t live with him if he kept drinking, Rex decided to live in the van.
Things got worse in Lori’s apartment. Rose Mary failed to clean the junk out, despite Lori’s repeated requests, and Rex was over all the time. Rex and Rose Mary would argue so aggressively, the neighbors started to complain. Lori couldn’t bring herself to kick her mother out, but Jeannette told her it was for the best if Lori wanted to stay sane. When Lori offered to help Rose Mary get set up somewhere else, Rose Mary declined.
Rose Mary and Rex lived in the van for a few months, but it was not street legal. When it was towed from an unauthorized parking space, they weren’t able to get it back. That night, they found shelter on a park bench. It was their first night as a homeless couple in New York City.
As usual, Rose Mary saw being homeless as a new adventure. She and Rex had figured out how to successfully live on the streets. They slept on benches and in bushes, and during the day, they’d stash their gear and wander the city. They became experts about where to get free meals and attended all the free cultural events around the city during the summer months. When the weather grew colder, they went to the public libraries to stay warm.
Once winter came, Rex and Rose Mary slept in churches or sometimes split up. Rex would go to a shelter, and Rose Mary would sleep at Lori’s. These occasions were the only times Rose Mary admitted that being homeless was sometimes hard.
Jeannette felt trapped between wanting a life free from her parents and the guilt of allowing them to languish on the streets. She hid her past from everyone in her life. She didn’t defend her parents when a friend said all homeless people were scam artists, and she didn’t defend herself when one of her professors took offense to her claim that sometimes homeless people wanted to be homeless.
Jeannette considered leaving college to help support her parents, but Lori talked her out of it. She said there was no point for Jeannette to jeopardize her future, and besides, Rex would never allow it. He was proud of Jeannette’s achievements. There was also the house in Phoenix and land in Texas. Their parents had options. They were living the way they chose to.
After a long winter, Rex contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized. He didn’t want any visitors, but Jeannette went to see him anyway. Wearing a surgical mask, Rex introduced her to all his friends in the TB ward. Next to his cot were stacks of books. Rex had sobered up since his hospitalization and become interested in mortality and the relationship between physics and the cosmos. His research even made him wonder whether God existed.
Rex was released from the hospital after six weeks. It was the longest he’d been sober since Phoenix. Rex wanted to stay sober, so instead of going back on the streets, he found a job in Upstate New York as a resort handyman that included housing and meals. Rex loved being back in the wilderness and stayed at the job for much of the year.
As another winter drew nearer, Rose Mary convinced Rex that two people could survive winter on the streets better than one. Rex quit his job and moved back to the city. He was drinking again within the first week.
Jeannette had tried to help her parents a few times, including buying Rex a supply of new winter gear. But they would never accept anything from her. Rose Mary blamed the city, saying it was too easy to be homeless in New York. Jeannette accepted that there was nothing she could do, but her inability to help wasn’t just about her parents refusal. She was struggling to save money for school and, in fact, was short a thousand dollars for her final year’s tuition.
Rex had taken a keen interest in Jeannette’s education. He read all the books on her course lists so he could help her with her work if she needed it. When he found out she might have to drop out of school, he told her to meet him at Lori’s place. When she arrived, Rex dumped out a bag full of small bills totaling $950. He also had a mink coat she could sell for the other fifty.
Jeannette didn’t want to accept the money, but he insisted she take it. Rex said he’d earned the money playing poker because it was his duty to take care of his daughter. Jeannette took the money and paid her tuition in ones, fives, and twenties.
Rex and Rose Mary found an abandoned building on the Lower West Side to squat in. There were other squatters who lived the same life of a nomad, an adventure around every corner, and shared her parents disdain for rules. Rex hot-wired electricity from a nearby pole so they could all have heat and lights. The apartment they’d taken up residence in reminded Jeannette of their home in Welch. It was all she could do not to run out.
When Jeannette graduated from college, the only person in attendance was Brian. Her sisters had to work, and Rose Mary thought it sounded boring. Jeannette had asked Rex not to go. She said she couldn’t risk him showing up drunk and causing a scene. Rex complied, saying he didn’t need to see her get the diploma to be proud of her.
The magazine where she worked offered her a full-time position, and she finally moved out of the psychologist’s house and into an upscale apartment on Park Avenue belonging to her long-time boyfriend, Eric. Jeannette liked Eric for his obsessive organization and responsible nature. He was from a wealthy family, didn’t waste money, and was kind. Still, Jeannette remembered her parents’ joy at finding their place in the world within the squatter community. She wondered if she was where she was supposed to be.
Life on Park Avenue was more than Jeannette ever dreamed possible for her life, and she was thriving at the magazine. She made good money and wrote a weekly column, which was basically a gossip column about prominent figures in the New York social scene. She interviewed famous and influential people and was invited to fancy parties and events. Jeannette had finally become someone who had their finger on the pulse of society.
Rose Mary thought Jeannette had sold out. She wanted Jeannette to write important stories about social inequality and housing issues. Rex, however, was Jeannette’s biggest fan. He read all of her articles and researched the people she wrote about at the library. Every now and then, he’d call her up with a piece of juicy gossip he’d unearthed about someone’s past.
Jeannette kept the secret of her family and background even more closely guarded. She told herself this new exclusive world wouldn’t accept her if they knew the truth. She never brought up her parents, and when asked a direct question, she’d pull out the same lie she told the child welfare worker: Rose Mary was an artist, and Rex was an inventor working on a system to burn low-grade coal. She said they lived in a big house on a hill overlooking Welch.
Jeannette and Eric were married four years after she moved in. Their life together was stable and uneventful, and that was just the right speed for Jeannette.
A few months after Jeannette’s wedding, Rose Mary’s brother, Jim, died. Grandma Smith had left the other half of the Texas land to Jim. Rose Mary wanted to make sure the land stayed in the family, so she told Jeannette to ask Eric to help her buy it. Jeannette was happy to help and said she had some money saved up. All she needed was the land value to start the process. Rose Mary was cagey, as she had been their whole lives about the land. But when Jeannette pressed her, she said she needed a million dollars.
Jeannette nearly fell off her seat. She thought about how her uncle’s land was the same size as her mother’s. She asked if Rose Mary’s land was worth the same amount, but Rose Mary said she didn’t know. She’d never had it appraised, but she guessed it was more or less the same.
Jeannette was floored. Her mind raced through all those years without food or heat or water or clothes. She thought about the years her parents had been on the streets and squatting in an abandoned building. Was it really possible that Rose Mary had allowed all of them to live that way while sitting on top of a gold mine?
Jeannette wasn’t going to ask her new husband for that much money, and Rose Mary said she was disappointed. She’d never asked Jeannette for anything, and now Jeannette wouldn’t help her keep the precious family land. She’d expected more from her daughter.
While Lori, Brian, and Jeannette continued to move up in their careers, Maureen struggled. She graduated from high school and enrolled in one of the city colleges, but she didn’t take it seriously. Eventually, she dropped out and moved in with her parents. She started working random jobs that never lasted and accepted the kindness of men who wanted to care for her.
The longer Maureen stayed with her parents, the worse her life became. She stopped working, stopped leaving the apartment, and took up smoking and reading as her daily activities. But her relationship with Rex was strained. She called him a worthless drunk, and he shot back that she was pathetic and should have been drowned at birth.
Jeannette tried to bring Maureen back to life, but she saw that her sister was too far gone. Maureen chain-smoked while rambling about Mormon cults in Utah, even accusing Jeannette of being part of one. Jeannette was sure she was on drugs, but she couldn’t convince Maureen to seek help. Rose Mary wouldn’t help either. She thought everyone was making too big a deal.
After another six months, Maureen snapped. Rose Mary told her that she would have to move out and learn to fend for herself. In response, Maureen stabbed her. Maureen was arrested, convicted, and sent to a mental facility Upstate. A year later, she was released and bought a ticket to California. She wouldn’t allow anyone to see her off, so the morning of her departure, Jeannette woke early and whispered to the air, “I’m sorry, Maureen.” She’d let her sister down.
Both Jeannette and Brian grew distant from their parents after Maureen left. Brian married and moved to a house on Long Island, and he now had a baby daughter. Lori was more in touch with Rex and Rose Mary, but they stopped having family get-togethers.
A year after Maureen left, Rex called Jeannette and asked to see her. He also asked if she’d bring him a bottle of vodka. When Jeannette arrived to their tenement, a half-gallon of vodka in tow, she found her parents snuggled under a blanket in bed. They were older, more worn and weathered, and overly thin.
Rex announced that he was dying. He said he’d contracted a rare tropical blood disease from a Nigerian drug dealer. In actuality, all the years of smoking and drinking had caught up to him. He had a few weeks to months left, which meant he might not live to see sixty.
Despite all of the ways Rex had made their lives chaos, Jeannette couldn’t imagine life without him. They stayed up talking about old times, and Rex reassured her that he was okay with his life ending. Even though he’d never built the Glass Castle, he’d had a hell of a time planning it with her. Jeannette was the one good thing he’d done with his life. She’d made him proud.
Two weeks later, Rex had a heart attack. Jeannette, Lori, and Rose Mary were at the hospital where he was hooked up to life support. Jeannette had the sudden urge to check him out Rex Walls style. An hour later, Rex died.
Jeannette grew discontent with her life. She couldn’t stay still anymore and always wanted to be someplace other than where she was. She took up ice skating just to feel like she was moving forward. But even that didn’t help. Within a year, she divorced Eric and moved out of the apartment. She found a small apartment and finally felt like she was where she belonged.
Five years after Rex’s death, the family gathered at Jeannette’s home for Thanksgiving. She was remarried and living in an old farmhouse Upstate. Her relationship with Rose Mary had dwindled over the years, and her mother had never met John, her new husband.
Jeannette and John picked Lori and Rose Mary up from the train station. Jeannette smiled at the ease with which John related to her family. He was also a writer and published a few books and magazine articles. He was warm and compassionate and had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage.
Back at the house, Brian waited with his eight-year-old daughter, Veronica. He and his wife had also divorced, and he now lived in a house he renovated in Brooklyn. Brian had moved up in the force to sergeant detective running a unit that investigated organized crime.
At dinner, Rose Mary made an announcement. After fifteen years squatting in the abandoned tenement, she and the other squatters were being granted ownership of their homes. She also said she’d heard from Maureen, who was still in California. None of the children had spoken to Maureen since she left New York. They were delighted that Mauren was thinking of visiting.
The family reminisced about the craziness of the past and all of Rex’s antics, including those that showcased how much he cared about his kids. John proposed a toast to Rex, and Rose Mary raised her glass. She said, “Life with your father was never boring.” Jeannette could almost hear her father laughing from wherever he was.
Jeannette Walls’ story of growing up poor and neglected is at times too fantastic to believe. At other times, her story hits at common family struggles that resonate beyond her own life.
How does Jeannette’s story relate to your life or remind you of something from your past?
Does learning about Jeannette’s struggles and triumph over adversity make you think about your own journey differently? In what way?
What aspects of Jeannette’s story do you find the most compelling?