At a steakhouse in Van Horn, Texas, Patti Meister pauses to consider her past.
"How many times have you been married?" her son has asked her. He is testing his mother, certain that she'll fudge the sum.
Carefully and silently, she begins counting the nuptials, ticking them off on her fingers, one by one, as if she were a child practicing her addition. This is no easy task for a 58-year-old woman with an extraordinarily colorful past.
Finally, as Patti awaits a chicken-fried steak dinner to be delivered to the table, she arrives at her answer, although still a little unsure of its accuracy.
"Ten," she says, exhaling cigarette smoke through her nostrils. "No ... yeah, 10."
Her son, surprised by Patti's response for its close proximity to what he knows to be the truth, requests a recount.
"Ten? I believe it's 11," he says.
Patti stumbles for a moment, then mutters the names aloud and in order: Dave, Herschel, Doug, Joe, Jerry, Junior, Jim, Ron, Darrell and Jeff.
"What about that guy who kidnapped you at gunpoint ... the fugitive who was wanted for murder? What was his name?" the son asks.
"Tom?" she says. "Now, wait a minute. That one was annulled."
The moment resembles something out of a dark comedy, with the restaurant's Southwestern motif of pink and green pastels accentuating the punch line. Yet underneath the bizarre hilarity lies a feeling of desperation.
Patti isn't proud of her matrimonial failures, but, at the same time, she doesn't feel shame. She has never been ashamed, her son learns.
She has left Las Vegas, her home for more than a decade, to drive more than 1,500 miles to Houston, where she will spend her days searching the Internet for husband No. 12.
In fact, Patti has already begun the process. While No. 11 is pushing for an annulment, she is already networking with potential suitors while on the road to the next phase of her life - a return to her birthplace, but certainly not a rebirth.
Patti's 31-year-old son joined her in Phoenix, after about five hours of driving through desert brush scenery south and slightly east from Las Vegas. She never directly asked him to accompany her, but he felt obligated, nonetheless.
He can't forget what his mother asked him so often when he was a boy, waiting for his response as if her life depended on it.
"Are you going to take care of your mommy when you grow up?"
The question was overwhelming for a boy not yet 10, but he was determined to succeed where other men would fail, so he always said what he knew she wanted to hear.
"Yes, mommy, I'll take care of you forever."
Making sure Patti made it safely to her destination was a small way of keeping that promise, as well as a chance to become reacquainted with a woman he was slow to believe was deserving of his respect.
Out of Control
Patti once won a Chevy Silverado, extended cab, in a casino raffle in Las Vegas. A compulsive video poker player, she won $1,000 jackpots monthly during one yearlong lucky streak. The truck, though, was the largest single reward the mother of two ever took home.
Years later, Patti is driving east on Interstate-10 in a Chevy Tracker, a much smaller alternative to the Silverado she traded in for cash. Patti adamantly denies her son his frequent requests to be allowed to drive some of the long distance.
"No one drives my car but me," she says as she begins the trek south from Phoenix to Tucson.
Still, the son persists.
"Do you realize that every car has passed us?" he asks.
"Do you realize that I do not give a crap?" she shoots back. "I am not in control when I drive that fast.
"All this traffic makes me nervous," she adds, gripping the steering wheel, her knuckles turning white. Her son looks out across the highway in front of them and notices just three cars more than 100 feet ahead, pulling away fast. This time he keeps quiet.
Later he learns from Patti that her driving paranoia stems from a pair of accidents in her adolescence.
The first, when she was 15 and on a date with a boy named Paul who drove a convertible, left her with a concussion and unconscious for four days. She was thrown from the vehicle and ended up in a neighbor's front yard, her white dress turned blood red.
The other came when she was 18 years old, riding horseback - a horse that had not been broken. The horse abruptly halted its gallop; Patti followed through on its behalf, and was paralyzed for more than seven months before miraculously regaining movement in her legs.
"So, this nervousness about having other people drive comes from accidents that happened 40 years ago?" her son asks, believing that Patti has a tendency to embellish the truth.
"Yep," she says defiantly.
"Don't you think that's a problem?" he asks.
"It's not a problem for me," she retorts.
It isn't the sort of response he was looking for, but Patti's son seems content simply knowing something of this woman's childhood - how she formed the ideas she clings to today.
For the rest of 50-or-so mile markers between Benson, Ariz., and Lordsburg, N.M., Patti fills in the blanks of her modestly rebellious teen-age years.
Marriage Proposal
She dated George Jones, the legendary country singer when she was 16 years old and growing up in Houston. He was pushing 30, a year after he made "White Lightning" a honky-tonk anthem in 1959.
Patti figures a future with Jones could have become reality had her father not found out she was being "friendly" with a musician nearly twice her age.
A few years later, she married her first husband, Dave, a local country singer 12 years Patti's senior who would spend years trying to make his way to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, his personal Mecca. He died in his mid-50s as he was, again, on the verge.
She had a "thing" for country musicians, and her infatuation led her to her fifth marriage, to Joe, a handsomely chiseled and talented singer and drummer whom Patti met when she was 19 and he was 14, playing at smoky bars throughout Houston. They married six years, four husbands, three divorces and one annulment later. Patti was just 25. Two years later, they had a son.
She survived being held at gunpoint by her third husband, a fugitive on the run for murder who held off the pursuit of police in three states while Patti kept her 6-year-old daughter quiet in the backseat.
Several years later, her sixth husband, whom she had divorced after constant physical abuse, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head during a telephone conversation with Patti. He left her a small five-figure fortune, which she spent on cars, new furniture and a pool table for herself and her eighth husband.
Her history has left her somewhat jaded.
"There's no such thing as love," Patti tells her son on the second day of their trip as they continue the long haul across west Texas. "Love is a four-letter word to me."
Which brings the two of them to Patti's departure from Las Vegas. Her son wonders if this is the attitude she declares upon entering a relationship, or if her insolence is simply a byproduct of sour apples for another marriage that failed.
"If you don't believe in love, then why bother to get married?" he asks.
"Because, the way I was raised, you don't just live with somebody," she says, citing her Catholic upbringing. "I've never lived with anybody."
Her son speculates aloud that it's Patti's lack of judgment that has her marriage count - as well as the constant flux of stability in her life - so high. He expects more from a woman who worked in law as a paralegal certified in three states for nearly 35 years.
"Really, how well do you know these men you've been marrying? Obviously, not very well," he answers for her. "It doesn't make you look very smart, mother."
"I am smart," she jousts, with a slight giggle. "I just don't make the smartest decisions.
"The latest marriage would have to be the least smart thing I've ever done. I wasted three years of my life ... three good years," she says. "When you're young, you don't think of wasting time. When you're old, you do."
Social Insecurity
Patti is moving to Houston to live with her daughter, in a small bedroom where she will collect Social Security payments and meet men via the Internet. She met husbands 10 and 11 - Darrell and Jeff - in America Online chat rooms, and she has depended on the Web in search of a comfortable life as much as she did those local casinos and video poker jackpots in Las Vegas.
It is too sad an existence for her son to comprehend. He wishes Patti could do more with the twilight of her life, and within himself he knows that this was his true motivation for enduring this journey.
But Patti will argue that this existence is a far better cry from the one she left behind in Nevada.
"I'm free as a bird!" she boasts. "Did you hear my new voice mail?"
Her son has heard it, but he wants his mother to repeat it anyway, hoping that she will realize the ridiculousness of such outward shamelessness.
"It says, 'This is the new and improved, single Patti Meister,'" she sings. "'Houston, here I come!'"
"Why would you feel the need to do that, mother?" he asks.
"I just felt like it."
"Are you going to change your last name again, or will you keep Meister?"
"Well," she says, chuckling, "I'm not exactly fond of the name Meister. I'd like to change it to my son's last name, but I'm worried that with my Social Security, disability, the credit that I've established with the name Meister ... that if I change it, I won't see any money for six months. So, I probably won't change it."
Never Again
They have crossed through the heart of Texas and traveled through San Antonio. They are only a couple of hours from their final destination, and they are in constant communication with Patti's daughter, Kelli.
The 37-year-old mother of two is happy Patti is coming home and will provide an environment she believes will be healthier for her mother. However, Kelli is less than thrilled at the prospect of phone calls from strange men Patti has met on the Internet, and even more frightened that one will eventually stop by their home.
It is an issue that has split the mother and daughter apart in the past, yet despite Kelli's pleas, Patti remains defiant.
"I wish that she would quit this ... the Internet, the marriages, all of it," Kelli says. "She's got a problem. But what am I supposed to do? She's my mother."
Patti's son is less tolerant and has always been the one of the two siblings more determined to change their mother - to make her suitable for the affluent life he wishes to lead.
As Patti discusses what went wrong between her and No. 11, her son makes one last attempt to open his mother's eyes.
"Everyone else was wrong. Jeff was always right," she complains.
"Don't you think that sounds a bit like the same problem you have yourself, mom?"
"That's right," she laughs. "It's my way or the highway. Unfortunately with Jeff, it was never my way."
Her son arrives at the conclusion that his mother is a walking contradiction. She craves control, yet succumbs to the whimsy of men she knows very little about.
"Are you scared of things you can't control?" he asks.
"Yep."
"Then why do you give [control] up so easy by making yourself indebted to men you depend on to take care of you?"
Patti is at first offended, then somewhat withdrawn. She seems to fancy herself as a great manipulator, and proudly exposes her strategy.
"That will never happen again," she warns. "I'll be in charge of my own well-being; they'll be paying for it.
"I will never give up control again."
He wonders if love will ever matter again to his mother, or if she will simply live the rest of her life this way, eventually becoming so cold-hearted that an experience like the journey they have taken - a candid exchange of emotions and feelings - will never occur again.
"There's no such thing as love," she reiterates. "Nobody at my age gets married for love anymore."
Familial Revelation
Patti's son stays overnight in Houston once they arrive at Kelli's house. They arrive early in the evening, yet the night passes quickly as the unpacking of the crammed Tracker occupies his time.
Once he is able to relax, her son takes in the moment.
He has tried his best to change Patti, to turn her into the mother he wanted her to be. He longed for normalcy as a child, and never realized his plea for such a life was heard in vain, until now.
It would be so easy for him to leave this place, this home filled with weakness - a sister too weak to stand up for her principles; a mother too weak to fend for herself - and never return.
But then he turns to Patti, and simply asks, "Mom, are you happy you're here?"
She smiles, sinking into the seat of a very lived-in couch, glances around at the only family she has, and says, "Yes ... I'm very happy. It's good to be home."
"Are you nervous?" he asks.
"Not anymore," she says. "My son is with me."
With that, a son can reveal himself, having finally begun to fulfill a promise he made more than 20 years ago. He has taken care of his mother, and he can be relieved that it wasn't his failure to do so that turned his mother's life in the direction it took.
This author can finally tell his readers - more importantly, the woman whose story he has told - that Patti is my mother.
And I am certainly, and gratefully, her son.
