Taking Terri Mueller. Norma Fox Mazer

what kind of place they’d look for, and the interesting people they were sure to meet.

      Often, when they traveled, they ate out in diners and restaurants, but just as often they’d shop in a supermarket and buy special things to eat in the car like Lorna Doones and bunches of green grapes. Their favorite traveling food, though, was always a plain old bread, bologna, cheese, and lettuce sandwich.

      They didn’t have too many rules in their life because Phil said—and Terri agreed—that the main rule was to be thoughtful about each other. That covered a lot of territory, such as each of them letting the other know where they were at all times, and not waiting for the other person to clean up any messes Barkley made. In the car, though, they did have rules, such as no eating peanuts in the shell (too messy), and no soft drinks (Phil didn’t approve of the caffeine), and no driving while sleeping. That was Terri’s rule for Phil, because she wasn’t old enough yet to share the driving.

      Once she had asked him how he decided where they’d move to next. “Well, I don’t really decide, Terri,” he’d said. “We just get in the car and go, until it feels like it’s time to stop. When something clicks—I trust that. I trust my instincts and feelings. You know how it is.”

      But, in fact, she didn’t know, didn’t really understand that sense of being carried along by instinct. She began to think of her father as emotional and herself as rational and sensible.

      She was a tall girl with long hair that she sometimes wore in a single braid down her back, and sometimes parted in the middle with a wing of hair pulled back and held with a barrette on either side of her face. She was quiet and watchful and didn’t talk a lot, although she liked to talk, especially to her father, with whom she felt she could talk about anything. They were close, very close, companionable, and easy with each other, and she sometimes thought of him as her real best friend, distinct from the best friends she made in whatever school she happened to be attending.

      He had taught her to drive in the Pinto when she was eleven years old. On Sunday afternoons in a deserted parking lot, she’d practice J turns, parking, and stopping on a dime. Her father would laugh and say, “Terri, you’ll have your driver’s license before you have your learner’s permit.”

      She had always thought she’d take her driver’s test in the Pinto, but last year on her twelfth birthday, they traded in the Pinto for the camper truck. She had hated to see the Pinto go and shed real tears for it, as many, in fact, as for the various mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs who had come and gone in her life.

      But quite soon she became devoted to the camper and hoped they would never trade it in. The cab was like an ordinary pickup truck, but in back a little metal house sat on the truck bed. Inside were two beds, a sink, propane refrigerator and stove, table and benches, and a minute bathroom with a chemical toilet. Everything was small and every bit of space was used. There was a water tank underneath and a metal luggage rack on top.

      “The camper makes us completely free,” Phil said when they bought it. “Anytime we get the urge to travel, we can just go, Terri. And stop wherever we want to.”

      They rarely stayed in any place for more than six or eight months. Terri had heard her father say, “I’ve got restless feet,” so many times that she almost thought of his feet as having a life of their own, as if it were Mr. Restless Feet, and not Mr. Philip Mueller, who kept them on the move.

      Last year, for instance, Terri had gone to school in Richmond, Indiana, until June when they went south to Wilmington, North Carolina. In August they drove north again and decided to live in Niagara Falls, mostly because they both got hooked on the awesome Falls. Then in June, after school was over, they drove to where they were now, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

      Wherever they landed, Phil had little trouble finding work. He was a carpenter and an all-around Mr. Fixit. “I wouldn’t be without you, Terri,” he told her, “and I wouldn’t be without my toolbox.”

      The toolbox, a large green metal box, with double handles, about the size of a bureau drawer, was always with them, even if they went out for a short Sunday drive. It probably weighed a hundred pounds full. It used to be that Terri couldn’t budge it—she would try regularly—but now, using both hands, she could just lift it and stagger a step or two.

      The tools—the hammers, wrenches, pliers, the doall, wood chisels, levels, planes, and saws—were as familiar to her as her own face. That, and her father’s wide leather nail belt with its pockets and dangling hammer slings that he wore when he was working, slung low around his hips like a cowboy.

      Down in Wilmington, Mrs. Lawrence, who ran the Bide-A-Wile Trailer Park, where they had stayed for the summer, had hired Terri to take care of her kids, Meg and Nate. At the end of the day they’d all sit outside on the Lawrences’ trailer stoop and wait for Phil Mueller to come home.

      “My,” Mrs. Lawrence said nearly every day, “he is very good looking.”

      And remembering that now, Terri asked slyly, “Daddy? You recall Mrs. Lawrence?”

      “Who?” He was hunkered down, checking the radiator.

      “Mrs. Lawrence from the Bide-A-Wile Trailer Park.”

      “Oh, Fran. Sure.” He looked over his shoulder at Terri. “What about her?”

      “You know what she used to say about you?”

      “It must be funny from that look on your face.”

      Terri folded her arms in imitation of the trailer park manager. “‘My,’” she drawled, “‘he is very good looking.’”

      Her father laughed. “Is that what she said? Never told me that.”

      “What did she say when you went out on dates?”

      “Dates?” Phil pulled a face. “You make me sound like your teenaged father.”

      “They were dates,” Terri said. “You went to the movies with her, didn’t you? Did you buy her popcorn? What else did you do?”

      “Subject closed.”

      She would have teased him a little more, but just then a woman walked into the empty apartment. “Oh!” She stared in surprise. “Excuse me, I didn’t know anyone else was here.” Her hair was tucked into a red bandanna. She was holding a little boy by the hand. “Are you looking at this apartment, too?”

      “We’ll be through in a few minutes,” Phil said.

      “Don’t rush on my account. It’s just—they didn’t tell me in the rental office.” She opened the bathroom door. “Is this real tile? How neat! Most places have everything fake these days.”

      The little boy was wearing blue and white striped overalls that said Oshkosh B’Gosh. He had big brown eyes and light frothy hair. “Hi,” Terri said. He got behind his mother, then peeked out with a serious expression.

      “Say hi to the girl, Leif,” his mother said. “Say hi, honey.”

      He shook his head.

      “That’s okay,” Terri said.

      “This really is a neat place,” the woman said. “What fantastic windows.”

      Terri liked that she didn’t badger the child to say hi. She really hated it when adults did that to kids. She’d noticed that a lot of adults thought kids had no private life, that they could say or do anything to children just because they were bigger.

      “It’s a fine apartment,” her father said to the woman.

      “If you only knew some of the dumps I’ve been looking at. Am I sorry you’re here first!” She had big excited eyes and a big grin. “I’m going to take a look at the kitchen—just in case you guys decide not to take this place.” She held up crossed fingers.

      Terri and her father finished inspecting the apartment. “So, what do you think?” Phil asked. “It won’t be easy to heat with those big windows.”