In October 2009, Dad spent two weeks hand sanding our kitchen table’s surface, filling in holes, and rubbing layers of tung oil onto its top.  The last time he refinished the table, in 1996, we lived in Cullompton, Devon, just prior to moving to America.  My parents shipped our family, and that table, over 4,000 miles to take up jobs at Metro-Christian Fellowship, a non-denominational, charismatic church in Kansas City, Missouri, for $20,000 a year.  Mum had sold her ten-year-old, home-health business, Devon Care, and Dad’s degree in maritime law hung on the wall, unused. Dad re-made all the furniture before the move so we could begin in America with like-new things.  But it didn’t take long for the table’s seams to split, and Dad took out the tung oil again. 

“See, how the knots come out,” Dad said, nodding toward the table. “There’s a depth to it—the more coats you rub on.”

I paced around the pine table, arms clasped behind my back, like a surveyor.  Dad bent at the waist, stretched over the wood, a ripped white T-shirt dipped in tung oil bunched in his hand, and wiped along the grain in long strokes.  “How many coats are you going to do?” I asked.

“If you wanted it to look like my guitar,” he said, lifting, adjusting the shirt, “maybe fifteen.  I’ll do six or seven on this.”  You could see all the streaks and shadows in the cherry mahogany of Dad’s guitar, hand built by Hugh Manson, even in a dim light.  Manson had made custom guitars for band members of Jethro Tull and Stereophonics, among other artists.  I remember going to Manson’s shop with Dad and staring up at the Classic S and Ts and the 42 “Kestrels” that hung by their necks on the wall, from cream to almost black, covered with dapples, stripes, and strange knots—designs I never knew could come from natural wood.

“See that,” Dad said, pointing to a dull crescent knot in the corner. “Watch how the colors change.”  He rubbed the oil into the spot, and the lines around the crescent popped out of the creamy pine, mimicking the shape like a string of mirrors.  Where the oil had dried, an illusion of ripples blemished the wood.  I wanted to touch it, to see if it felt like water or velvet, but I kept my hands clamped behind my back.  The table transformed into something new and strange—the divots, where food had lodged, now clean and smooth.

Thirteen years earlier, when I was 12, my parents had asked us, around that pine table in our seventeenth-century kitchen in St. Andrew’s House in Cullompton, if we wanted to move to America.  The mahogany wall clock clicked in the corner of the yellow room.  My sisters, Jo, 17, and Sarah, 15, leaned against the white kitchen counters, arms folded across their chests. My parents stood opposite them in front of the cooker.  I sat at the table in the middle of the room and slid my fingers across its crumby top. 

“I love America,” I said, blurting my opinion first.  I had just watched the movie Clueless, which portrayed American teenagers as rich and popular.  I imagined myself driving a silver Porsche in a mini-skirt.
“What about my friends?” Sarah asked. 

“I have A-levels,” Jo said, referring to her tests at school.

“Both of you,” Dad said to my sisters, pausing between each word, “can make your own decisions.” Then he looked at me. “It’s good you want to go,” he said, “because you don’t have a choice.”

I started to argue in my 12-year-old way that I could make my own decisions, but Mum shifted her weight onto her other foot. I observed the table’s seams where the wood had retracted from heat, causing straight, pea-deep fissures. The 100-year-old table had been bought by my grandfather in 1981 for £120 at the Pine Center, an antique’s shop in the cottage town of Menheniot, Cornwell, for my parents.  My grandfather refused to believe that the cost of goods could be haggled and vowed to pay for the table if my mother could reduce the price by £10.  The table’s original ticket: £170.

Four months after that family conversation, my parents, Sarah, and I waited at Gatwick Airport, in London, for the Boeing 747 that would take us to Kansas City.  Jo came to see us off.  My mum hung onto her with curled fingers.  Dad pulled her away from my sister; both wore red, wet faces.  I had tried to cry, but images of make-up and designer clothes filtered through my head. I wanted a new, Hollywood life.  When we arrived in Kansas City, nothing seemed to fit the pictures in my head.  The table followed us on a container ship, delivered five weeks late, in March 1997, and my parents placed it in our new house, a house of sticks—not brick or cob like England but wood and sheetrock.  Images of Porches and mini-skirts became the reality of yellow buses and Wal-Mart jeans—no palm trees or beaches, only ice, everywhere.

In January 2003, I ran away to Las Vegas with my boyfriend Ricky (later, I found out Ricky’s real name was Gary) to help him evade the police for repeat forgery charges.  I called in sick to work and drove him to Vegas.  I worked at John Robert Powers, a modeling agency in Kansas City, as a receptionist, so when I told my parents I was going to a modeling conference in Vegas, the lies slid into their ears like honey.  I drove us through the Rocky Mountains in my three-cylinder, 1999 Chevrolet Metro—the engine maxed out at 40 mph up those hills—and a cop pulled us over in Colorado for driving too slow, thinking we were high on marijuana.

We drove through the desert and toward the lights of Vegas.  I imagined a place like Time’s Square in New York City, where store lights flash onto the street from smudgeless windows, where men and women wear black suits and synchronize their cross-walking.  But in Vegas, lights in the shape of naked girls dimmed through curls of cigarette smoke—a young woman in silver, 5-inch heels and a matching shimmering dress that barely licked her bottom, bowed into a Bentley with an older, giggling man—and pictures of girls in bras and panties, or naked, carpeted the streets.  I only intended to stay the weekend, to help Ricky find a place, but the modeling agency in Kansas City fired me for calling in.  Employment in Vegas consisted of waitressing, internet sex talking, stripping or prostituting.  Ricky stripped, but I refused, and waited for a waitressing job.

In March, after two months of cabbage soup and cocaine, we drove back to Kansas City, and Ricky turned himself in to the police.  I returned to my parent’s table as skin stretched over bones. My mum held a hand to her mouth when she saw me and hugged me loosely, as if I would break.  I curled up in my dad’s chair at the head of the table.  Mum and Dad perched on either side of me.  My mother’s face had sprouted new wrinkles; Dad looked tired. 

“I went for a modeling conference,” I said the lie again, but this time, the words plopped out of my mouth in chucks and fell onto the table in an incoherent manner.

“We know,” Dad said, “what you know.  Now is your chance to tell us what you know.”

I didn’t want to say that I had moved to Vegas to help an ex-convict run from the police because I loved the guy.  I didn’t want to tell my parents that he stole my computer, forged checks, showed me how to cook “special K,” and put me thousands of dollars in debt.  But I did.

“I only went to get him settled,” I said.  I rocked in Dad’s seat.

“You have a lot to learn, girl,” Mum said.  “So stupid.”

“I know.”

“Come here,” she said.  I sat on her lap at 18 years old and let her hold me.

In October, after Dad had finished wiping tung oil into the table, he paused and mimicked pulling the cloth over the wood in mid air. “You’ve got to rub it with the grain,” he said, “because the wood absorbs it real fast.”

I watched the table swallow the wet oil and wondered if the wood filler, stuffed in the crevices, would change too.

“When you’re finished,” he said, “you polish it in circles. It’s like new.”

Yes, I nodded, like new.