The Last Days of California

WEDNESDAY

It was Wednesday and we hadn’t even made it to Texas yet. We’d been sleeping late, swimming during daylight hours, but we were going to have to move if we wanted to make it to California in time.

In a shitty little town in Louisiana, which was full of shitty little towns, we stopped at a Waffle House and sat at the counter. My father liked to sit at counters because he liked to be among the people—you couldn’t just ask if they’d been saved, you had to win them over first, had to make them like you—but there was no time left for niceties. He had brought along a bundle of tracts that said “All Suffering SOON TO END!”

When the waitress asked how we were doing, he handed her one.

“The world is passing away,” he said, “but those who do the will of God will remain forever.”

In response, she set a tiny napkin in front of him with a knife and fork on top. Then she moved down the line: my sister, Elise, and my mother and me.

I watched my father, who was looking around pleasantly to see if there was anyone who might be willing to talk to him. There wasn’t. There hardly ever was. He was either preaching to the choir or trying to convert the unconvertible, but it didn’t stop him from going through the motions—the futility of it was central, necessary. He didn’t really want all 7 billion people on the planet to be saved. We wouldn’t be special then. We wouldn’t be the chosen ones.

I set my elbows on the counter. It was sticky with syrup, and I liked that this Waffle House was like every other Waffle House I’d ever been to. I knew where the bathroom was and what I wanted to eat and what it would taste like.

I peeled my elbows off the counter and looked at them.

“Excuse me, miss,” my mother said, too quietly for the waitress to hear her. “Excuse me,” she said again, louder.

The waitress came over and stood in front of us. She was tall and hulking and had a missing tooth, or maybe it was just a large gap—the space didn’t seem quite big enough for a tooth. I stared at her openly. She was ugly and I wasn’t afraid of ugly people.

“This counter is sticky,” my mother said, touching it with her finger.

The waitress left and came back, wiped it off with a dirty-looking rag.

Elise dug around in her purse and pulled out her lip gloss. She smeared it on her bottom lip and top lip and pressed them together. It was almost obscene, watching her put on makeup. Boys frequently told me she was a knockout and then waited expectantly for my response. Of course there was nothing to do but agree. She was a knockout and I wasn’t. What was there to say about it?

“Why don’t y’all go clean up?” our mother asked. Neither Elise nor I said anything. We didn’t respond to suggestions, only direct orders.

I brought my hands to my face. “Clean as a whistle,” I said.

“I wonder where that saying comes from,” my sister said. “Whistles aren’t clean, they’re full of spit.” She got out her phone and Googled it, and I watched her face as she read, the dents at the tops of her eyebrows. “‘One possibility is that the old simile describes the whistling sound of a sword as it swishes through the air to decapitate someone, and an early nineteenth-century quotation suggests this connection: a first-rate shot, his head taken off as clean as a whistle.’”

She hopped off her stool and I turned to watch her go, ponytail and hips swinging. It was how she walked down the halls of our high school. She never looked at anybody and made people call her name again and again before turning. She was wearing her King Jesus Returns! t-shirt with a pair of shorts that were so short you couldn’t tell she was wearing them. I saw a man watching her, too, a mean-looking little man with a girl on his lap. The girl was skinny with big joints and glasses, one arm choking a ratty stuffed animal. He pulled her thumb out of her mouth and she put it back and he pulled it out and she put it back in again. I looked around at the other diners: they were all hideous. I could live easily in a town like this.

The man’s food came and he scooted the girl off of his lap and dug in. She reached for a triangle of toast and he slapped her hand.

“Ask first,” he said, but she didn’t ask and he didn’t give it to her. I imagined a scenario in which the girl had been kidnapped years ago. She’d been with him so long that she had forgotten any other life ever existed.

My mother reached over me to get a packet of Sweet’n Low and I leaned back in an exaggerated manner. She smelled bad, like a wounded animal. She had gotten her period as soon as we’d left Montgomery, and it reminded me that I hadn’t showered in days. I’d gone swimming last night, though, had stayed in the pool for hours listening to Elise talk to a boy who was selling magazines across the country. Every morning, the boy woke up early and drove to a different town. He didn’t have time to see anything or do anything and he ate fast food off dollar menus to save money. He wanted to go home, but he had barely made anything after his expenses—he might even end up owing them. It was modern-day indentured servitude, he’d said. I’d been waiting for Elise to one-up him with her pregnancy, or to tell him that our father was driving us twenty-five hundred miles so that we would be among the last people in the Continental U.S. to witness the coming of Our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, but she didn’t say anything except that we were going to see the Pacific Ocean.

Elise sat back down and poured two creamers into her coffee, stirred it with a fork. She drank coffee every morning now; she’d drink cup after cup and hold up her hand so I could watch it shake.

When the waitress returned, my father ordered a T-bone and my sister ordered a waffle and my mother ordered a Fiesta Omelet and I ordered a hamburger. Elise had stopped eating meat six months ago, but I’d catch her stealing glances at our pulled pork sandwiches, our sausage-filled side of the pizza. She had a whole spiel about animal rights and the environment and the nutritional requirements of the human body and our father had his own spiel—he said if people stopped eating meat, animals would overrun our cities and wreak havoc and the economy would crash. He said if meat weren’t available, people would turn to cannibalism.

My father searched his pockets and went outside, came back and divvied up a thin newspaper. He handed me the entertainment section, and I read my horoscope and checked to see what was coming on TV later. I hoped my sister and I would have our own room again so we could watch whatever we wanted.

“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is on at eight,” I said, leaning over my mother to show Elise. We loved movies from the 1980s, the ridiculous clothes and graphics, the clunky phones and boom boxes. We liked The Last Starfighter, Sixteen Candles, The Goonies. We liked anything with Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson, who were so old now. If they were raptured, they’d be restored to their former beauty. I liked Andrew McCarthy best in Less Than Zero, Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. Molly Ringwald was never pretty enough to be a leading lady, but the eighties were a dream world in which the captain of the football team would leave the homecoming queen for an awkward red-haired girl who made her own clothes.

I watched the cook break my patty off a stack and place it on the grill. He seasoned the steak and cracked eggs into a bowl, moving so fast he seemed to be doing all of these things at once. He wore a little paper hat to distinguish himself. It was a nice touch, old-timey. I picked up the entertainment section again and read Elise’s horoscope. I wanted to tell her what it said, but our parents thought horoscopes were evil because the only one who knew what was going to happen was God. Elise’s advised against extended travel, which she would have found amusing. Mine said I was on an information-gathering mission of sorts—I was to keep my questions unstructured and people were going to tell me the most unusual facts about themselves and the world. I liked the sound of this, particularly the “of sorts” part. My mission could be whatever I wanted.

I passed Elise the entertainment section and my father passed me the front page and my mother was stuck with the sports. Like all mothers everywhere, she had no use for sports. I read about the drought in Louisiana. We were passing through a red zone labeled “exceptional drought.”

“I think the end times have already begun,” I said, showing them a picture of a woman standing on the ashes of her house. She had her face in her hands, a couple of smudged children in the background.

“This is nothing compared to what’s coming,” our father said. “It’ll be like nothing we could even imagine. There’ll be three 9/11s in a day—tornadoes in places that have never seen tornadoes and earthquakes where there are no fault lines. The sun’ll turn red as blood and bodies’ll be piled up everywhere. Thank God we won’t be around to see it.” He always sounded so excited when he talked about the tribulations. He liked the idea of all the sinners getting what was coming to them while we were rewarded with eternal life.

“These things have always happened,” Elise said, pouring another creamer into her coffee.

“They seem to be happening a lot more now,” I said.

“They’re just reporting on them more, or they come in cycles we’re too young to remember,” she said. “I’ll tweet Anderson Cooper for some hard stats, it’s probably just global warming.”

“It seems like everything’s global warming.” I wasn’t sure what global warming was, exactly, but it felt disappointing. Our father didn’t believe in it. He said it had been made up by the Left for political gain. I could see him wanting to say something, but our food came and he picked up his napkin and set it on one knee. Then we all bowed our heads.

“Thank you, Lord,” he said. I kept my eyes open and watched the cook’s legs move, the slight bulge in his pants. “These are simple words, but they come from simple hearts that overflow with the realization of your goodness. We ask you to bless us as we eat, bless this food and bless the hands that prepared it. May the words of our lips spring forth from hearts of gratitude and may we bless others as we fellowship today.”

As soon as he said “Amen,” Elise was typing on her phone, thumbs moving fast over the keyboard. She stopped and reread it to herself before reading it aloud so I could tell her it sounded good. She loved Anderson Cooper, thought of him as a personal friend. He was gay, though—never before had there been so many homosexuals: “If a man also lie with mankind, they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

While the rest of us ate, Elise drank coffee and paged through the paper. She checked her fingers to see if they were ink-smudged, picked up her phone and set it back down. She was about to cut into her waffle when her phone signaled the arrival of a text message. She smiled and shook her head, so it must have been Dan, the boy who had done this to her, only he didn’t know it yet, and maybe never would. She wasn’t like the girls from 16 and Pregnant whose boyfriends left them to raise the baby alone, frazzled and post-baby fat, studying for the GED.

When the last of my burger began to fall apart, I pushed my plate away.

“Do you want my waffle?” Elise asked.

“Okay,” I said.

“You aren’t going to eat anything?” our father asked. He didn’t like it when we didn’t eat. It made him angry.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“You need to eat something. You hardly had any dinner last night.”

She slid her plate over to me and I scraped butter into the holes, filled them with syrup. Elise was sick with the baby and the driving and she’d always had a weak stomach, like our father. She was the delicate sister, she liked to tell me, which wasn’t true, but I’d found there was no use in telling people what they were like.

The waitress wedged the check between the napkin holder and saltshaker and my father picked it up and went over it carefully, running his finger down the column. He had a number 3 in black ink on the back of his right hand. Every morning he scrubbed it clean and wrote a new number—tomorrow would be 2 and then 1 and then 0. At zero, we would be in California, listening to the rapture on the radio or watching it on TV. I still didn’t understand why he thought it was important for us to be among the last; it was something he had gotten into his head.

Elise took the check from him and looked it over. “It’s right, Dad,” she said.

He paid with cash, counting out the bills carefully and probably leaving a bad tip, and led me to the door with a warm hand on my back. “My girl,” he said, patting. Whenever he put a hand on my body, it went up and down and up and down like it was difficult for him to touch me for more than a second at a time.

In the trees, birds made sounds like dogs whimpering. They flew down to pick through a patch of fresh dirt.

“What are those?” I asked.

“White-winged doves,” he said.

“Like the kind you hunt?”

“Cousins.”

“They sure are fat,” I said, looking up at him, my eyes landing momentarily on the sun. He hunted doves every fall, brought them home by the sack for our mother to soak in Wish-Bone and wrap in bacon, and I was always scared I was going to bite into a pellet but I never did.

My father unlocked the Taurus and we got in. He was about to back up when he noticed the rearview mirror had fallen off. Our mother picked it up off the floorboard and handed it to him without comment. She had become suddenly, suspiciously quiet. I didn’t know what was going on with her. I hadn’t asked. She took her clip-on sunglasses out of the glove box and cleaned them with her shirt. They were blue-tinted and held onto her regular glasses by a magnet.

My father swore as he tried to stick the mirror back on, and then he handed it to my mother and started backing up.

“Is there anything behind me?” he asked, already out of the parking spot.

Elise and I collected wrappers and bottles and handed them up to our mother, stacked the magazines and placed them on the hump between us. Elise moved the bag of snacks to her side of the floorboard. It was full of things we’d never buy at home: Cheddar & Bacon Potato Skins, peanut butter wrapped in pretzels, squares of fudge that appeared homemade but had probably been made in a factory like everything else. I wasn’t going to look in the bag because I was sure the fudge had leaked out of its plastic and made a mess of everything. I liked having these snacks—they felt like protection against something. I could conjure up all sorts of scenarios in which they might save our lives.

Our father rolled to a stop at a red light, and I watched a one-legged woman hobble down the concrete median. She was slim and youngish with shoulder-length hair and a sign that said ON MY LAST LEG. I socked Elise in the arm and she pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to me. I pushed the button on the door; my window went down, stopping not even halfway.

“What are you doing?” my father asked. He didn’t like it when anybody rolled down the window. He hit the door-lock button.

“We’re giving the woman some money,” Elise said.

“She’ll just use it to buy drugs,” he said.

“It’s possible.”

“There are services for homeless people,” my mother said. “They don’t have to stand out here in the heat all day begging.” She looked at my father and I studied her profile. My mother was a plain woman who didn’t do much in the way of improving herself. She wore very little makeup and black or khaki pants with oversized shirts. She dyed her hair, but only the flat medium brown that was her usual shade, which she hid from my father as if he wouldn’t be able to go on loving her if he found out. She reminded me of Marcie from Peanuts, compact and nondescript with round glasses that hid her eyes. I wanted her to be more like some of my friends’ mothers, who wore jewelry and nice dresses with heels; even the fat ones seemed regal, proud.

“Give her a tract, Jess,” my father said, his arm swinging back and forth at my legs. He got a weak hold on my ankle and I yanked it away.

The woman hobbled over on her crutch and took the bill.

“God bless you,” she said, shoving it into the good-leg pocket of her jeans. It reminded me of the times homeless people had said this to me when I hadn’t given them anything, how nasty it could sound. The woman looked almost normal close-up, her face dry and brown but pretty.

My father cracked his window. “It doesn’t take God any time at all to save someone,” he said. “In the last hour of a terribly sinful life, the thief on the cross was saved by Christ.” She gave him the finger. The car behind us honked.

“Go,” my mother said, leaning forward.

My father stepped on the gas and the car jerked into motion. He viewed the bad reactions as a spiritual test. Otherwise, he wouldn’t compare a woman he didn’t know to the thief on the cross, he wouldn’t be such an asshole. He followed the line of cars merging onto the interstate and I wondered if anyone missed the woman and wanted her to come home. I didn’t know how people survived if there was no one to miss them.

“‘And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’” our father continued. “‘And Jesus said unto him, verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in paradise.’” He repeated “paradise.” In paradise, he wouldn’t have to work or worry about money. In paradise, he wouldn’t have to take insulin shots, pinching the fat on his stomach and stabbing himself before meals. Half the time he didn’t do it and we didn’t remind him. He had an Asian doctor he called Woo who always sent him home with pamphlets about diet and exercise, which only pissed him off—he ate more ice cream and drank more Coke now than ever. He had also started drinking alcohol, which wasn’t something he would have ever done before. It seemed to represent a terrible shift: a complete resignation, all hell breaking loose.

Ten minutes later, he was still thinking about Elise’s donation to the one-legged woman. “How much did you give her?” he asked.

“A fiver,” Elise said. She flipped a page in her magazine, stopping to look at a woman lying on a floor in a matching bra-and-panty set, her rib bones sticking out severely. The woman was reading a book, advertising glasses.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“She needs it more than we do, and her sign was funny.”

“It wasn’t funny,” I said, “it was sad.”

“You have no sense of humor.”

“I have a sense of humor,” I said, but I thought about it and decided that my sense of humor probably wasn’t very good. People had to explain jokes to me and I’d say they weren’t funny and the person would say of course they weren’t funny—you had to get them right away for them to be funny. I didn’t understand that, either, how getting them right away made them funny.

I watched the mile markers pass and then picked up one of Elise’s magazines. I liked them because they arrived in the mail full of slick colorful ads, smelling like perfume, and they told you how to do everything without even trying. I left it open on my lap and looked out the window again. Interstate miles were boring, though the font on the signs changed by state and sometimes it was hilly before it was flat again. I watched for Starbucks and Love’s gas stations. Starbucks had the chocolate graham crackers I liked, and Love’s had a good selection of baked goods and ripe bananas. I saw a sign for Chick-fil-A and wondered why I only wanted it on Sunday, when it was closed.

I readjusted my seatbelt and propped my feet on the tracts. We had passed out dozens of them, but the bundle didn’t seem to be getting any smaller and I wanted to throw them out the window: they’d get stuck in the branches of trees; prisoners would stab them with their pokers. I picked up one—the picture garish, Technicolor—a man and a woman sitting in a field surrounded by cows and horses and chickens. There were barrels of apples and pumpkins in the foreground. In the background, a nice house and lots of trees and a blue, blue sky. In a nod to multiculturalism, the man and woman could have been Mexican or Middle Eastern or Native American. I reread it for the thousandth time: God made Adam and Eve perfect, but He didn’t want them to be mindless robots so He gave them free will, which they used to disobey Him. As a result, God was letting us see how poorly we were able to rule ourselves by allowing this experiment with total freedom to continue, but it would soon come to an end because we’d messed it up big time—thousands of years of war and poverty and suffering.

I thought about it, God holding us accountable for something we hadn’t done and then letting us continue to rule ourselves so badly for so long in order to show us that we needed Him. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, really. The logic seemed sketchy.

I had handed out these tracts in shopping malls, left them between the pages of books in libraries and bookstores. I’d handed them out at parades and street festivals and I’d once gone door-to-door with an older boy from church but our pastor said door-to-door wasn’t our territory—we weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses, we weren’t LDS. For all my time and efforts, I hadn’t saved a single person. Even the believers didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted to shop for blue jeans and summer reading books in peace.

Elise rested her head on my shoulder, and I smelled mint from whatever shampoo she’d used this morning. Then she took her makeup bag out of her purse and spread the bottles and containers around. I wanted to touch them, smell them. I loved going through her things. “Would you hold the mirror?” she asked.

I tried to hold it steady as she put on her base coat. She applied blush, eye shadow, eyeliner, and mascara, stopping every once and a while to adjust my hand or tell me I was holding it too low.

“I can’t believe you wear all that stuff. Doesn’t it feel like your face is melting off?”

“It makes me feel pretty,” she said, screwing the tops back on and putting everything away. “You want to play poker?”

“Not really,” I said, but she took the deck of cards out anyhow, shuffled them on one knee. A few fell to the floor. I counted out pistachio shells because we weren’t allowed to gamble with real money, not even pennies. Sometimes we gambled with the good bobby pins we were always swiping from each other, the ones you could only find at Sally’s, but we were running low.

I had a crap hand—2 of clubs, 10 of clubs, 6 of hearts. I put mine down and she put hers down, but then she picked hers back up and checked them again. She wasn’t good at cards, wasn’t good at games in general, but it didn’t make her not want to play.

A motorcycle gang roared past and we stopped to watch them go by, only one with a woman on the back, her long hair whipping itself into knots. I imagined the woman Indian-style on a bed, combing out her wet hair, and then I imagined the man combing it for her. He would tell her how beautiful she was even though she was old and had eye bags, even though her stomach was flabby from having his children. I wanted to sit on a bed with a man who would comb out my hair and tell me I was beautiful. No one ever told me this except for very old women who thought all young people were beautiful.

After the motorcycles passed, I spotted something large and headless in the road, a swath of bright red like a can of spilled paint. There were scavengers circling above, waiting for a lull in traffic so they could swoop down. Their shadows on the pavement were all wingspan.

I popped a pistachio shell into my mouth. It was still salty. I picked up another and another and tossed them in.

“Think of all the things those have touched,” Elise said.

I thought about the pile of them on the motel bedspread, right after I’d seen the pregnancy test, and spit them into my hand. One pink line and you’re okay. Two pink lines and your life is over. My sister was pregnant. I’d forget and then I’d remember and be shocked all over again. Not only had she had sex, but she had gotten pregnant. Months from now, we could be sitting here with a baby between us, its little baby hands and baby feet, its baby mouth trying to latch itself onto our breasts.

Our parents didn’t know, of course. Our parents were oblivious, Elise said, and quite possibly stupid, but I didn’t agree. I thought our mother might be psychic.

Elise picked up the bag of snacks and flung it at me. I tied it in a knot and closed my eyes. I hadn’t been sleeping well again. I wasn’t a good sleeper, my mother had said once, and I liked the way it sounded—as if sleeping was a talent, or a skill I had yet to learn. I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream or because I had to pee and lay there for hours thinking about things that didn’t bother me at all during the day. Other times, I forgot I was a bad sleeper, but I hadn’t forgotten since we’d left Montgomery. The secret to a lot of things was to forget, but I was always remembering.

“Welcome to Texas,” our mother said.

“The great state of Texas,” said our father.

Elise showed me a picture of an RV on her phone. It said HAVE YOU HEARD THE AWESOME NEWS? THE END OF THE WORLD IS ALMOST HERE! “Listen to this,” she said. “‘Greta Burrows, an obese, middle-aged woman who spent the morning leaning out the window shouting on a bullhorn, picked up some Visine and a box of Kleenex at the local Rite Aid.’ I bet she also picked up some Cheetos. And probably some MUNCHIES, too.”

“Which leg of the tour is that?” I asked.

“Florida. Greta’s the one that left the door to her house open—not unlocked, but wide open. And she won’t say how many kids she has or if she has a husband because the only thing that matters is warning people.”

“That’s hardcore.”

“I know, right?”

“I should get y’all a bullhorn,” our father said.

“I’d use a bullhorn,” Elise said. She tried to roll down her window, but it was on child-lock, so she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted into the front seat: “Repent or die! The sun’ll turn red and drip blood! Your neighbors will perish in grizzly accidents!”

“Elise!” our mother said.

“They won’t be accidents,” our father said, “oh no, they won’t be accidents at all.”

Our father pulled off into a combination Pilot/McDonald’s truck plaza. He put the car in park and sorted through the maps on the side of his door. In a field next to the gas station, an oil derrick pumped lazily.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Change of plans—I know there’s one in here somewhere. Here we go.” He handed the map to our mother and put his elbow on the back of his seat, turned around to look at us. “I need to apologize,” he said. “I’ve been doing y’all a disservice. You can’t experience this great land of ours from the interstate. It’s all Taco Bells and Targets.”

Elise and I looked at each other. We didn’t feel we were being done any disservice. We liked Taco Bell and Target.

“From here on out, we’ll be taking the highway and eating at places called Restaurant,” he said. “I want you to experience the real America before it’s too late, the places where real people live and worship.” He didn’t care if it was going to cost us time. Time would soon be made irrelevant.

“Okay,” Elise said, “but I’m not staying in any fleabag motels with a bunch of drug addicts. I want to stay at Holiday Inns.”

“We haven’t stayed at a Holiday Inn yet,” I said.

“We won’t be staying with drug addicts,” our mother said, taking the clip-on part of her sunglasses off. Cleaning her glasses was a nervous habit, like our father pausing to survey his surroundings, like my fake yawning.

“And I’m not going to any roadside zoos, either,” Elise said, looking at me because I’d wanted to see some Cajuns feeding alligators in Louisiana.

“What if there’s snakes?” I said. “You’d want to see snakes.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Why would I want to see snakes?”

“You used to have a snake.”

“It was a tiny little garden snake,” she said, “and I was like seven.”

“We aren’t going to any zoos,” our father said. “We don’t have the money for that kind of stuff.”

“I bet we could save some people,” I said.

“That’s the idea,” he said. “That’s the spirit!” I thought of our cousin, a blonde on his side with a haircut our mother had called a Mary Lou Retton. When I was eleven, I’d gone with him to pay for a motel room for this cousin. He’d been out of work again and we’d scraped together the money in loose change and small bills.

This woman was dead now. She had been beaten to death in a different motel room, in a different city. I remembered the name of it because it was odd—the Admiral Benbow in Jackson, Mississippi. I had no memory of her except from pictures and family reunion slide shows, though my mother said she’d babysat us when we were little, when she was just a high school girl.

Our father got out and slipped three quarters into the air machine.

Elise opened her door. “Oh my God,” she said. “It must be a hundred and ten out here.”

“Hundred and four inside the car,” our mother said. “And don’t let your father hear you say that.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” she said.

“You don’t mind if we say ‘oh my God?’” I asked, and my mother said of course she minded, it was sacrilegious. Then she took out her phone and called one of her sisters, but I couldn’t tell which one—their voices all sounded alike: loud and slow with accents we had somehow escaped. She had three sisters and one brother and they were always calling each other, even though, except for my uncle in west Alabama, they lived within a few miles of each other in Montgomery. They liked to talk about who died and who had cancer and who was getting a divorce. They liked to be the first to know so they could call each other up and relay the bad news. But whoever was on the other end got another call and had to go.

Our father often questioned her loyalty—asked whether she was with us or with them. Since he wasn’t close to his own family, his loyalty was unquestionably to us. We weren’t sure if he disliked our mother’s family because they were Catholic or if he just couldn’t stand for her affections to be split.

I found a spot of something on my t-shirt, guacamole maybe, that scratched off in flakes. The black King Jesus Returns! t-shirts did a good job of hiding sweat stains and mustard, and it made me appreciate this required uniform. Our mother was wearing one, too, a large that hung loose and shapeless over her hips. Our father had on one of his no-iron Brooks Brothers shirts; today’s was green-and-white striped. His sister gave him gift cards at Christmas. She got them for putting a lot of stuff on her credit card.

“Will we still get to eat at McDonald’s?” I asked.

“Your father won’t give up McDonald’s,” our mother assured us.

“I like McDonald’s in the morning.”

“We know you do, Jess,” Elise said, “we know.” She fanned herself with a magazine. It had the swim-suited bodies of celebrities on the cover, their eyes blacked out with rectangular boxes. My parents didn’t like Elise’s music or clothes or the TV shows she watched or the magazines she read. They didn’t like most of her friends or any of her boyfriends. They used to have long discussions with her about God’s intentions for her life, and our father would tell her she was going to hell and she’d be there all alone—she’d be in hell all alone—but now they pretty much let her do what she wanted as long as she maintained appearances. As long as we were all in church every Wednesday and Sunday, sitting quietly in our nice clothes.

The main difference between Elise and me was that I was a liar. I did things our parents disapproved of, but I did them quietly. I didn’t even have to be all that quiet about it because she made so much noise it was easy for them to overlook me altogether. I’d seen every episode of Jersey Shore and 16 and Pregnant. I read Elise’s magazines when she was finished, and I’d once sucked the gas from a can of whipped cream and gotten high for about thirty seconds.

“I’ll be right back,” Elise said, getting out.

I opened my door and ran to catch up with her. A boy watched us from the tinted window of a pickup, a cowboy hat in the middle of the dash and two dogs scrabbling over each other to bark at us from the bed.

The doors slid open and the cold air enveloped us.

We walked straight back to the bathroom and I stopped at the weight machine, tall and blinking. I hadn’t weighed myself since we’d left home and I’d been eating everything in sight. I decided I didn’t want to know and went into a stall. It had four locks, three of them broken. I pulled the top bar across and hovered while staring at a woman’s feet in the stall next to mine. They were wide and sunburnt and her toenails were too small for her toes. They were the ugliest feet I’d ever seen, but she was wearing expensive-looking sandals and the nails were painted and I thought it was nice that she did what she could with them.

I opened the door to a girl standing in front of the mirror, singing along to “Family Tradition,” which was being pumped throughout the building. I washed my hands while she took sections of her hair and sprayed it into different shapes with a giant can of aerosol hairspray. She was wearing tight black jeans tucked into a pair of leather boots, her face a smear of pinks and purples. She was probably a prostitute and would soon be caught up in a fireball, but now she was going about her business, making her hair as big as possible. I fixed my own hair in the mirror, running my fingers through it and then patting it down. I spent a lot of time looking at myself, trying to figure out what was wrong with my face.

I took my cell phone out of my purse and held it at different angles, but I couldn’t figure out any way to take a picture without her noticing. I read a text from my mother I’d already read—“American Idol is starting!”—and deleted it.

Elise came out of a stall and the girl froze, can of hairspray suspended in the air. My sister smiled at her, an open friendly smile that said she was no threat at all.

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing at the girl. “Fifty?”

“You have more than that.”

“You shouldn’t have given all your money to that woman.”

“Give me five.”

I gave her a ten and opened the door with my elbow. Money had become precious now that I was earning it myself. I was bad at my job, making snow cones at a candy store, and no matter how much I got paid, it didn’t seem like enough.

I walked back and forth in front of the drink cases a few times before selecting a Yoo-hoo. Then I stood in the candy aisle, trying to decide. The guy at the register was watching and I turned my back to him so it might look like I was preparing to slip something into my purse or down my shorts. I’d never stolen anything, but when people watched me so closely, it made me feel guilty, made me want to be caught and found innocent.

I chose a pack of Skittles and a King-Size Snickers, carefully considered a bag of caramel Bugles. Ever since our father had been diagnosed with diabetes, our mother had been trying to make us eat healthier—she’d stir-fry vegetables in PAM and bake chicken in corn flakes. She’d swapped the regular mayonnaise and cream cheese for low-fat versions that we immediately recognized and called her out on. And then she’d tried a different tactic. She began to make strange, foreign dishes we had no names for; the most recent had been a burnt-orange soup made with tomatoes, eggplants, and chickpeas.

“How much are these?” I asked the guy, picking a hard boiled egg out of a basket.

“Thirty-five cents,” he said. He was freakishly tall with stick arms crossed in front of his chest.

“Thirty-five cents,” I repeated.

He pushed his hair back from his face, and I placed the egg on the counter, stopped it from rolling. I paid for everything and loaded it into my purse, and he gave me sixteen cents back, which I dropped into the tray of leave-one-take-one pennies, which was maybe too much to leave in the tray of pennies.

Outside, the girl stood smoking a cigarette, a dog at her feet. In the sunlight, she wasn’t pretty at all. She had a puffy scar beneath one eye, blackheads on the sides of her nose.

“Is that your dog?” I asked.

“No.”

“What’s his name?”

“I said it’s not mine.”

“What kind is it?”

“Are you deaf?” she asked. And then, “Blue heeler.”

“Does he bite?”

“I dunno, I just found him here.” I crouched down to pet him, and she said, “I’ve known heelers to bite, not the best people dogs. This one’s okay, though, you can look at his eyes and tell.” She started to say something else and stopped, as if remembering she had no reason to talk to me. I petted the dog’s head, which was too small for its body, and thought about giving the girl some money to feed him, but I didn’t want her to buy condoms or cigarettes with it.

I tried to think of other questions for my information-gathering mission, but everything I could think to ask could be answered in one or two words: yes, no, fuck off.

The dog looked at me and I looked at him and I had the feeling I got sometimes with dogs and babies, like they could see that I was bad, like they were waiting for me to lift my hand into the air and bring it down hard.

Elise came out eating a red, white, and blue popsicle—a rocket pop—the kind we used to buy from the ice-cream man in our neighborhood. “What’s his name?” she asked.

The girl repeated what she’d told me, that she’d just found the dog, or the dog had found her. “I’m traveling,” she added. “I can’t have a dog with me all the time.”

My sister held the popsicle out so it wouldn’t drip on her shirt, leaned over to take another bite. “Where you headed?”

“Las Vegas,” the girl said.

“Why Las Vegas?”

“Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t explain it to you,” she said.

The popsicle streamed down Elise’s fist, trails of red and blue staining her hand.

“I’m going to stay at Paris,” the girl said. “At night, the stars are all over the place like a real night sky. There’s two bathrooms and a minibar with chocolate and cute little bottles of wine and you can look out and see the whole city.”

She’d probably seen the hotel on the Travel Channel, that boring show with that boring Samantha Brown woman. I had no idea why anyone would have ever put that woman on television, let alone given her her own show.

In the car, my mother was listening to Joyce Meyer. “Repeat after me,” Joyce said. “I don’t have to bleed any more. I don’t have to bleed.” I liked the sound of it—not only the way she phrased it, but the idea that suffering was something I inflicted upon myself and I didn’t have to do it any longer. All of my suffering could stop this very minute.

My mother and I liked Joyce Meyer, but my father would make her turn it off when he got in the car. He said she didn’t consult the Bible, but I thought he disliked her because she was loud and opinionated, and worst of all, unattractive. I especially liked to watch her on TV, her matching pantsuits and careful makeup and the way she said amen over and over like it was a question. Amen? Amen? She couldn’t stand it when the audience was quiet. She’d talk about her husband then, tell us something Dave said, and the men would be reminded she was just a wife and the women would be reminded that we were always only wives. But still, she was the one on stage while Dave sat in the audience waiting to be talked about.

I bet she had a lot of money and hardly ever gave any of it away. I bet she ate steak every night and slept in hotel rooms with thick, white carpet.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, taking a slug off my Yoo-hoo.

“The Waffle House didn’t sit well with his stomach,” she said.

“I guess we can add that to the list of places we can’t eat anymore.”

Elise got in the car and asked where Dad was.

“The bathroom,” my mother said, checking her watch even though there was a clock in the middle of the dash.

“You’re running a minute behind on every conversation,” I said. “It’s super annoying.”

She leaned over and opened her hand: a pink lighter with the words “True Love” in red rhinestones. “Texans love to bedazzle some shit,” she said. “I couldn’t decide between this and one with Elvis’s head on it—young Elvis. Have you ever seen pictures of young Elvis?”

“Of course.”

“He was amazing,” she said. “I see we’re picking up Joyce Meyer. How wonderful.”

“Joyce is preaching on obeying God and being blessed,” I said.

“Isn’t she always?”

“Unless she’s trying to explain why bad things happen to good people.”

“That’s a tougher sell. What town are we in?”

“Beaumont,” our mother said.

“Beaumont! I think that’s where Footloose was set,” Elise said. We loved Kevin Bacon, too. Kevin Bacon was his most beautiful in Footloose, primarily for the angry dance scene in the abandoned warehouse, even though you could tell it wasn’t always actually Kevin Bacon. When the camera panned out, something was off—the torso too wide or the legs too long, something hard to put your finger on.

Our mother ejected the disc and placed it carefully back in its box. Elise and I watched our father stop to look around with his pleasant expression, his hands on his hips. He had biggish hips, almost womanly, that he was always calling attention to.

He got into the car making noises like he wanted someone to ask how his stomach was so he could tell us it wasn’t good. He tried to stick the rearview mirror back into place again, and this went on until Elise burst out laughing and then I started laughing. I was afraid he’d get mad, but he just sighed and opened his Coke. He called it Cocola, which made me think of him as a little kid. Once he was just a little kid hunting and fishing to put food on the table after his father moved to Florida with a red-haired woman.

He took another swig and another, throwing his head back jerkily as he made his way to the bottom of the can. Then he handed it to our mother and put the car into DRIVE.

As we were about to pull out of the station, a yellow convertible plowed directly into a white car, slamming it head-on. The man in the white car flew through the windshield and landed in the road as the cars spun off in opposite directions. It was very loud and then it was quiet.

“Oh my God,” Elise said.

My mother made the sign of the cross and my father backed up and parked in the spot we’d just pulled out of. We all got out. Both of the cars’ radios were playing, tuned to the same station. The people in the convertible were still in there, but the man in the white car must not have been wearing his seatbelt. He was faceup in the street and there was blood everywhere. I knew he was dead.

I looked over at a couple of teenage girls next to a gas pump, their hands covering their mouths. And then one of them removed her hands and screamed. After that, everybody started moving. Elise dialed 911. My father jogged over to the convertible and another man ran to join him. My mother sent me inside to tell the freakishly tall guy, but he already knew, so I went back out and stood next to my mother and Elise, the Las Vegas girl, and her dog. We had just seen a man die. A man who had been alive only moments before, thinking about nothing or nearly nothing—wondering whether it was too early to have a drink, or if he might go for a swim this evening—things that were so inconsequential they were an insult to his life. He hadn’t had a moment to prepare, would take all of his secrets with him.

I made up a hundred different scenarios. He was newly married to the woman of his dreams. He was a drug dealer, a felon, a preacher, a man with more children than he could afford to feed. He was depressed and thought about dying all the time. No matter who he’d been, though, he would be described in heroic terms, like everyone who died as a result of someone else’s negligence. Perhaps he’d been going to the store for nothing more important than ice cream, an unnecessary trip he’d taken to get out of the house. I was sorry I’d never know him. If I knew even a little something, I might piece together a story for his life.

My father dragged a girl out of the passenger seat of the convertible, cradled her in his arms. She was nine or ten years old, tall and thin. My mother took my hand and began to pray, but I pulled away and left her there with Elise, ignoring their calls to come back.

The girl was Asian—Japanese—with long shiny hair in perfect order. She looked like she was asleep. When I was little we’d had a dog that had been hit by a car; my mother placed him in his bed, curled up, like he was napping. He’d looked perfect, not a spot of blood on him, and I couldn’t believe he was dead. I’d sat with him for hours, waiting for him to open his eyes.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“She’s breathing.”

“Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you think she’s in a coma?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

I wanted him to know something. “It looks like she’s asleep,” I said. Wake up, I thought. Wake up.

The other man had pulled a woman out of the driver’s side of the convertible. She was young and white and I wondered if she was the babysitter. The woman was alive, moaning softly, and then she sat up and screamed the most horrible scream I’d ever heard. And then she was shaking violently and screaming and the whole thing seemed like a bad television reenactment. No one was with the dead man. I walked over to him and crouched down, his face covered in blood and gashes. Elise and the Las Vegas girl joined me, watched as I touched his neck, which I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do without them there.

“Don’t do that,” Elise said. “What’re you doing?”

“Checking for a pulse,”

“Do you feel anything?” the Las Vegas girl asked.

I moved my fingers around, searching for the artery.

An ambulance arrived and a medic hustled us out of the way, and then there were police cars and fire trucks and we were moved farther and farther out of the way until we were no longer a part of it. We stood with the others, watching as they loaded them onto gurneys, as they covered the man in the white car with a sheet. My mother and Elise were crying. The Las Vegas girl touched my sister’s arm and they embraced. This seemed very strange and I tried to catch Elise’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

I listened as those around us tried to work out what had happened, explaining it to the new people who’d arrived on the scene. They were already getting it wrong. We had seen it up close—we’d had the best view and I felt like they should be asking us. The convertible hadn’t been turning into the gas station. They’d both been driving straight past each other when the convertible swerved into the path of the man in the white car, who was now dead. Who, I had decided, had been on an unnecessary errand to buy an unnecessary item. Maybe he hadn’t even wanted the item, but had offered to get it for his girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t loved enough to marry.

We stood there for another ten minutes, waiting for someone to involve us again, to ask us questions, but no one did. We got back in our car. Elise was still crying. I cried so infrequently that other peoples’ tears surprised me, though they didn’t surprise me now; my lack of tears surprised me. Why didn’t I feel things the way others felt them? It wasn’t that I didn’t care about people. It was more like I couldn’t really believe they were real. I dug my fingernails into my palm, hard.

I’d read somewhere that not caring about people was a sign of mental illness, but I didn’t feel mentally ill.

“I have blood on me,” my father said, holding up his hands and turning them slowly. It reminded me of that scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox was disappearing because his parents hadn’t kissed so he wasn’t going to be born. He got out of the car and went inside. I looked at my own hands—they looked clean even though I had touched a bloody dead man. I had a dead man on me.

My father drove ten minutes in the wrong direction and no one said anything. I thought about the girl, whether she might be Chinese or Korean instead of Japanese. Why had I thought she was Japanese? I didn’t know anyone who was Japanese.

Finally, Elise pointed out a butcher shop we’d passed earlier.

“Where’s that map?” he asked.

My mother opened it, unfolding and unfolding until it filled the front seat. I looked at the back of her head, her thin hair fluffed up. I had her hair—fine and eager to fall out; we had to bend over and brush it upside down to make it look normal.

“We need to get on 90,” my mother said, while my father kept driving the way we’d come.

“Tell me where to turn,” he said.

“I think it’s this way.”

“Just tell me where to turn.”

“The GPS is in the console,” Elise said, but our father didn’t like being told what to do by a machine. He’d turn too early or too late and there was no one to blame it on.

“There,” our mother said, “now.”

He jerked the wheel and took the exit left.

“Are there any wet wipes up there?” I asked.

My mother tossed me a package that had been opened long ago. They were dry but I rubbed them on my hands, anyway.

“Let me see that map,” Elise said. Our mother passed it back and Elise spread it out, West Texas on my lap and East Texas on hers.

“I’m sad,” I said. I didn’t feel sad, but I thought saying it might help me feel it.

My mother turned and gave me a slight shake of her head.

“What?” I said. She didn’t say anything. “What?” I said again. I sighed and tracked the highway with my finger.

“‘Welcome to the great state of Texas,’” Elise read. “‘Whether you are a visitor or a resident, I hope you take advantage of the vast and varied travel opportunities Texas offers.’ Well, thank you. We certainly don’t plan on it.” She started Googling various towns along our route to see if there was anything worth seeing, though we knew we weren’t going to stop. We didn’t really want to stop. We only wanted to know what we were going to miss.

“We’ll come really close to Mexico,” I said. “Maybe we could cross the border.”

“There are drug wars going on,” our father said. He’d read a news story about a tourist town where the kids hadn’t been in school since February because the drug cartels were demanding half the teachers’ salaries so the teachers were refusing to teach. In response, the cartels were decapitating them and leaving their heads in the streets. I watched my mother to see if she’d put a hand on his arm or give him a look, but she didn’t.

Elise flipped the map over and we studied the picture of the governor and his wife. They were handsome in the usual way of politicians: stiff-haired with closed-mouth smiles. The wife was blond, with pale skin and glassy eyes; she looked like a doll. The governor looked a little more reasonable, but not by much. Elise folded the map the wrong way and unfolded and refolded until she got it right.

I took the egg out of my purse, still intact.

“Where’d you get that?” Elise asked.

“The gas station.”

“That’s really gross.”

“You think everything’s gross.”

“What is it? Did you get me one?” my father asked.

“It’s an egg. And no, I didn’t know you wanted one.” I offered it to him and he agreed without hesitation, so I passed it up and opened my Snickers. I tore off a hunk and held it out to Elise, who shook her head. I was never going to be skinny like her. She said all I had to do was starve for a month, six weeks tops, but I couldn’t do it. It might as well have been forever.

“Do you want some salt?” our mother asked, opening the glove box to search for a stray packet, but the egg was already gone. Elise was the only skinny one, and I was glad for it because I didn’t want our whole family to be overweight—it would seem like a fundamental flaw, like something we’d never overcome.

Our father zigzagged through a small town in order to stay on the right highway, but then it split, one marked business and the other marked truck. After taking the business highway into a bricked and empty downtown, we learned to follow the one for trucks.

The next town we came to was nicer. There were a lot of stores—not just tire stores and gas stations, but shops selling pottery and cupcakes and seafood. The Texas flag hung in front of each one. Our mother looked back and forth, reading the signs aloud: HUCKLEBERRY’S SEAFOOD, LIGHTFOOT FLOORING, THE PLAY PEN, GOLDEN GIRLZ SALON, HOME BAKED.

“Angel Funeral Home,” she continued. “The Jalapeno Tree. Save America Vote Republican. Lupe’s Cantina.”

“I bet Mexicans don’t eat at The Jalapeno Tree,” I said.

“I bet they don’t eat at Lupe’s Cantina, either,” Elise said.

“I bet Lupe doesn’t even exist,” I said.

“The Palace Donuts didn’t make it,” our mother said, making the sorry clucking sound I hated. The sorry clucking sound that said she was happy the Palace Donuts hadn’t made it. I couldn’t figure her out. She seemed like a nice person, doing all of the nice things nice people did—visiting the sick and volunteering at church, sending flowers and thank-you notes, but when one of her best friends died, she hadn’t even seemed sad about it. I kept asking about the woman, even though I hadn’t liked her, a busybody who was always trying to draw junior high gossip out of me.

“Oh man, look at that,” my father said, slowing to a crawl for an old man pushing a lawnmower across the highway. The man stopped in the middle of the road to give us a dirty look before continuing. Our father got a kick out of that and Elise took a picture of him with her phone. Then she started taking pictures of other things: the backs of our parents’ heads, VFW posts, signs that read HISTORICAL MARKER I MILE, without ever indicating what it was they were marking.

At a stoplight, we pulled up behind a big shiny truck and my mother pointed out the bumper sticker—the state of Texas with a pistol across it: WE DON’T DIAL 911.

“Texas is scary,” Elise said.

“It’s all trucks and guns and meat,” I said.

“And football,” our father said. “They love football.”

“We’ve seen Friday Night Lights,” I said.

“That sounds familiar,” Elise said, holding her phone in my face. I pushed her hand away and she took a picture of my legs. “I hate all those things.”

“You’re a cheerleader,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean I like football.”

“No, but you support football.”

“I support hot guys in tight pants banging into each other,” she said.

“Elise,” our mother said, “please.” She asked our father to do something about her, but he got distracted by a deer on the side of the road.

“Do you see it?” he asked. I knew he was talking to me, that I was the one he wanted to show it to.

“I don’t see it,” I said. I never saw anything on the side of the road unless it was dead.

“Right there, at the tree line. You can’t miss it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s right there,” he said. And then, “You missed it.”

I hated the disappointment in his voice. “I never see anything,” I said, remembering that the animals weren’t going to be raptured. Our father had been trying to prepare us for a heaven without Cole, the dog we’d had for nine years. We’d dropped him off at the vet before leaving Montgomery. He hated being boarded so much and was shaking so bad I’d had to help my father get him inside.

Cole had had a stroke on New Year’s Day and I’d taught him to walk again, fashioning a harness out of an old dress. I’d slept with him on the kitchen floor at night when he’d been unable to control his bladder, while the rest of them slept comfortably in their beds. It was the best thing I’d ever done and I reminded them of it constantly. Cole was fine now, though he ran crooked and couldn’t catch squirrels anymore. I couldn’t imagine anyplace without him, without the small animals he loved to chase. That was my problem—I had no imagination—I couldn’t imagine anything other than what I knew. The way time functioned, for example. Minutes. Waiting. How long a day could be. My biggest fear was that things would go on forever and there would never be any end. The idea of forever terrified me, even if we were in heaven and everything was great there. Surely, it would have to come to an end at some point. There would have to be something else. When I wanted to scare myself, I’d lay in bed and think forever and ever and ever and ever and ever until I thought I might go crazy.

Our father said heaven was going to be perfect in a way we couldn’t even begin to comprehend because we’d never known anything like it. We’d be young and healthy and surrounded by our loved ones. There would be no fear and no hate and no war, happiness and pleasure like we’d never known. I was already young and healthy and surrounded by my loved ones and it didn’t seem so great. And I wondered how good happiness and pleasure could be without their opposites to compare them to. If everyone was beautiful, what would beauty even mean? What would I have to strive for?

“What’s the caravan up to?” I asked.

“Eating at every food court in every mall in central Florida,” Elise said, looking at her phone. “Greta’s a big Sbarro fan.”

“After they eat at Sbarro, I bet they cruise up and down the main drag and stop at Sonic for cherry limeades.”

“Swap the limeades for Oreo Blasts and you’d be right,” she said. Then she started laughing.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What’s so funny?”

“I just remembered something,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, angrily. I hated when she wouldn’t tell me what she was laughing about; it was like she did it to remind me that my life wasn’t as amusing as hers.

We passed fields of cows, tails swinging, standing in the sun. They had their heads down, eating grass. Just eating grass all day long. I fingered my gold-plated ring on my gold-plated chain. The ring said PURITY on the outside; on the inside it had my initials: JEM. It was cheap and ugly and Elise had the same one hanging from her own chain. We’d gone to a purity ball, made pledges. We’d worn white dresses, and our father had gotten down on one knee in a school gymnasium to slip the rings on our fingers: first Elise, then me. This had been four years ago, before I’d even gotten my period. Before we’d known better, Elise said, but we’d worn them so long they were a part of us. I felt naked when I took it off.

My memories of that night were good ones. There had been wedding cake and steak and a hot dip made with crabmeat. I befriended a young black girl, a pretty girl with gray eyes. I had never known a black girl before. The school we went to was all-white. The neighborhood we lived in was all-white. I only saw black people at the mall, or driving around in their cars.

Our father scanned radio stations and stopped at a program called Revive Our Hearts, the woman talking about Noah and the end times. The end times seemed to be all that was left to talk about. The woman said if you read the Old Testament, you would see that it had been necessary for God to wipe out the world in a catastrophic flood and it was necessary for Him to wipe it out again.

“The Flood couldn’t have been worldwide—there isn’t enough water in the oceans,” Elise said. “It would have taken five times the water in the oceans.”

Our father wasn’t taking the bait. He turned the radio off and pumped the gas, the car lurching and coasting, lurching and coasting. He did this when he was agitated or wanted to annoy us. If we said something, it would go on longer, but I usually said something anyway to point out what an asshole he was. This time I kept my mouth shut. It was probably making Elise nauseous.

I counted down the miles to the next town—22, 15, 9, 6, 4, 2—and then we were cruising into a little nothing town.

In front of a boarded-up convenience store, a fat woman manned a table full of colorful junk. We passed a man selling puppies out of a cardboard box, a young girl holding one up to get a look at its eyes. We passed a Subway, a tiny post office, and a tinier library. I thought about all these people living in all these towns and how I’d never know them, and something about it seemed sad and strange—maybe it was just that I’d never thought of them before, that they had never occurred to me at all.

“I feel sick,” Elise said. “Can I sit up front?”

“Can we change at the next stop?” our father said.

“No, I need to sit up front now.”

He pulled into a McDonald’s and Elise and our mother swapped. Then we decided we might as well get ice cream.

We were all in a better mood after that.

“Hi,” I said, looking over at my mother, a chocolate shake wedged between my thighs. She looked at me and smiled, her eyes blinking behind the blue lenses. She took my hand and I let her hold it a minute before pulling away.

I picked up my milkshake and turned to the window. At some point, my feelings for my parents had changed. I mostly felt nothing and couldn’t think of anything to say to them, but it was periodically broken by a brief, crushing feeling, a love so intense that there was nothing to do but reject it altogether.

We stopped for an early supper at a barbeque restaurant/gas station. Most of the gas stations were attached to something now. In Louisiana, we’d stopped at one attached to a tanning salon and Elise had tanned, cooking the baby while the rest of us ate shrimp po boys.

A handsome soldier held the door, called Elise and me “ma’am.”

“Thank you, sir,” Elise said, nodding at him.

“Thanks,” I said, so he would look at me and see that I was separate. He touched my shoulder for the briefest of seconds. I love you, I thought, and it felt like the truth.

The place was full of army men in their army hats and pants, stiff long-sleeved shirts. The material looked thick and uncomfortable, but they somehow managed to look fresh. We ordered at the front, but there wasn’t a four-top available, so my parents sat at one two-top and we sat at another, far enough away that we could pretend we were alone. I watched Elise pull the ponytail holder from her hair and comb it out with her fingers. She moved her head from side to side to gather all the stray pieces before putting it up again. The process took a long time, a minute at least. I wanted to talk about the Japanese girl and the dead man, but Elise would accuse me of dwelling on the negative. Debbie Downer, she liked to call me.

Her phone dinged. She read the message and smiled as she typed her response. As soon as she set it down, it dinged again. I searched the room and located the handsome soldier. He was by far the best-looking soldier in the room, tall and tan and broad-shouldered. He could pick me up, no problem.

“Dan’s so cute,” she said, showing me the picture he’d sent her. He was giving the camera an exaggerated sad face—bottom lip turned out, head tilted—so he must have done something wrong. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

“I guess. His eyes are kind of bloodshot.” I thought of the two of them watching TV together on the couch, how they created a space in which no one was welcome. I didn’t like Dan. He was always turning words around, calling Facebook “the book of faces” and stuff like that. Elise looked out the window and I stared at the delicate veins on her temple, blue and winding like rivers on a map. They were the only thing about her that wasn’t pretty.

Our father brought our food on plastic plates with little dividers. “Which is which?”

“Mine’s the one without pork,” Elise said.

He set them down, giving her the pork plate, and bowed his head.

“We can pray by ourselves, Dad,” she said. She glanced up at him and went back to her phone. He probably hated having daughters—we didn’t fish or hunt and we were having sex with boys, or would eventually have sex with them. I kicked her under the table and my father put his hand on my back. It went up and down a few times and he walked back to his table.

“You’re a jerk,” I said. I swapped our plates and picked up a greasy bottle of barbeque sauce, squeezed some onto a clean spot. “I’m going to throw your phone across the room.”

“Just leave me alone for a minute,” she said. “I haven’t talked to Dan in days.”

“More like twelve hours.” I bowed my head and then looked to see if she was following my lead; she wasn’t. I took a bite of potato salad. The tallest, most handsome army man would not be swayed by Elise’s beauty. He would brush my hair and be careful untangling the knots. He’d hoist me onto his shoulders at parades so I could catch all the beads.

I got out my phone and looked at it—no one ever texted me. I thought about texting Shannon, but there was nothing to say, so I turned the sound off so I wouldn’t have to hear it not ringing and beeping. Shannon was my best friend, though she complained constantly and blamed others for everything. She’d tell me about all of the things she did for people and how they took advantage, insisting I wasn’t one of these takers, that I was one of the few exceptions, but this conversation typically occurred after I’d borrowed her clothes or spent the night at her house two weekends in a row. I took another bite of potato salad and shook some salt onto the pile. I took another bite and another until it was gone and moved onto the baked beans. When the beans were done, I started in on my sandwich. I was starving and knew it wasn’t food I wanted, but it had somehow become my focus.

“I wonder if these beans were cooked with bacon,” Elise said, and her phone dinged again.

“The other day I was eating egg-drop soup and there were all these tiny little bits of ham in it,” I said. “You’re probably eating meat all the time and don’t even know it. Seaweed salad, too—there’s fish in it. ‘Contains fish,’ it says on the package, when you buy it at the grocery store.”

She ignored me and continued typing.

“Your texting and Googling are distracting me from the purpose of this trip,” I said. “I don’t even know how you live in the world.” I had heard someone say this once—I don’t even know how you live in the world. I liked the way it sounded. I took another bite of my sandwich. A piece of pork fell in my lap, barely missing the napkin.

She set her phone down. “You know why we’re really here, don’t you?”

“No—why are we really here?”

“Because Dad lost his job again,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“No, really, I don’t, or I’d tell you,” she said.

“I thought it was going fine.”

“We always think that,” she said. “He always makes us think that.”

We were quiet for a minute. “At least mom has a job,” I said. “She’ll never get fired.”

“Sure, mom has a job.”

Our mother taught third grade, had taught third grade when I was in third grade, the year my life had taken a bad turn. All of a sudden, you were either popular or unpopular, and boys liked you or they didn’t, a decision they made as a group. Before this, there had just been the kids we’d all stayed away from: the masturbators and scissor thieves and glue eaters, anyone who brought a separate container of mayonnaise in their lunch bag.

She sighed and balled up her napkin on her plate. She was like girls on TV—all they did was spin the spaghetti round and round their forks. I looked at my legs pressed against the yellow plastic, pale and wide. I placed a hand on one thigh and imagined slicing the fat away, how thin I would want them if I could just cut it off. They wouldn’t have to be as skinny as Elise’s.

“We shouldn’t judge him,” I said.

“Why not?”

My army man stood to leave—smiling and shaking hands. He grabbed a stocky guy by the elbow as he shook, the other hand clapping the guy’s back.

“He had a hard life,” I said. “We didn’t have to live his life.”

“So what?” she said.

“So we should have some compassion.”

“Stop,” she said.

“You stop.” I took my plate to the trashcan and then went to the bathroom, which was cowboy-themed, the toilet paper unspooling from a piece of twine. When I came out, a man was standing there. He asked me if the bathroom was clean and in proper working order and I said that it was, and this pleased him. After that I wandered around the store, weaving in and out of aisles considering things I didn’t want—motor oil and coffee filters and saltines, packages of Imodium A-D and Motrin. My army man was gone forever. I’d never sit on his shoulders at a parade, high up, safe from everyone and everything.

Soon after we got back on the road, the sky turned green and the lightning began, splitting the sky in half. I hadn’t seen lightning like that in a long time, maybe ever, though I’d once seen a tornado spinning off in the distance when my father and I went to pick up Elise from cheerleading practice. As soon as the funnel was gone, it was like something out of a dream.

The wind blew the car from side to side. It blew trash out of the beds of pickups, bags and boxes my father weaved around in case there was anything inside them. A few fat drops hit the windshield, and then there was the quiet moment while we waited for the downpour to begin.

The rain came all at once, battering the car. Our father slowed to a crawl and put on his hazards as eighteen-wheelers hurtled past. The windows fogged and he yelled at our mother to fix them so she fiddled with the temperature control: blasts of hot air followed by blasts of cold. I took off my seatbelt and scooted forward, my head between their shoulders—I couldn’t make out anything except the brake lights of the car in front of us and the occasional glimpse of white line.

My father pulled onto the shoulder and put the car in park.

“We could get rear-ended here,” my mother said, as the vehicles whooshing by rattled our doors.

“This shoulder’s big,” he said. It was a big shoulder, much bigger than the ones in Alabama. Cars passed on them, used them as extended turn lanes. There was a whole protocol to this big shoulder we hadn’t figured out yet.

My mother shoved my head into the backseat like she did with Cole. “Put your seatbelt back on,” she said.

I put it on and looked out the window. I liked to track the drops, but there was just a smear.

Elise stuck her feet in my lap and told me to rub.

“Why? Are they swollen?” I asked, fingering one of her smooth, red toenails. She punched me in the arm so hard I’d probably have a bruise in the morning. I closed my eyes. When I saw the lightning flash through my eyelids, I counted the seconds until thunder.

After a while, the rain slacked and our father pulled back onto the road, but it was the same as before: nothing but brake lights and glimpses of white line.

“It’s hard to believe Noah was the only man worth saving,” Elise said.

“If He thought Noah was the only man worth saving, he was,” our father said.

“I mean, how many people were alive back then? And they were all bad? That’s just really hard to believe.”

I pressed my forehead to the glass and banged it softly while Elise argued the scientific evidence against the Flood, which seemed like very solid evidence despite my unwillingness to listen, and then our father argued what was meant by “the world.” He spoke of ancient wood and seven types of mussels and his evidence seemed solid as well. But then Elise got angry—she always got angry first—and he said, “Why don’t we save it for this evening, when we aren’t in the middle of a dee-luge?”

I’d never heard him use this word before and didn’t think he had pronounced it correctly. “I don’t want to save it for this evening,” I said. “I want to watch Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and order pizza. Can we order pizza?”

Nobody said anything.

“Hello?” I said. It came out sounding horrible.

“If we can find someplace to deliver it,” my mother said.

The road narrowed into one lane for roadwork and my father bumped an orange cone; it wobbled but didn’t go down. My mother put a hand on the back of his neck and told him he was doing a good job, which she did when he was doing a bad job, and I got the spacy out-of-body feeling I got sometimes, like I wasn’t real, like nothing was real so nothing mattered. We could drive off a cliff and I wouldn’t care. And then the feeling was gone and I was back inside my body. I turned my hands palm-up and slowly moved my fingers, thinking, These are your hands. You are moving your hands. Sometimes I found this incredible, but now it just seemed dumb. Of course they were my hands. Of course I could move them.

By the time the rain stopped, our father’s nerves were shot.

At the next town, he pulled into a motel in the kind of place he was trying to save us from—two motels, two fast-food restaurants, a gas station, and a bar—but all the small towns were like this. The factories had closed and people were left with a few places to regroup on their way to someplace better, except they didn’t go anyplace better. How did they survive? I bet most of them were on disability or welfare.

We stayed in the car while he went into the office, the radio playing Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks. Halfway through Martina McBride, he gave the thumbs-up and we got out. The pavement wasn’t wet. It looked like it hadn’t rained here at all.

“Did we get our own room?” Elise asked.

“Not tonight,” he said.

“I thought you were putting everything on your credit card.” The way Elise figured it, the credit card was free money since my father didn’t believe he’d be around to pay it back. She didn’t understand why we weren’t staying at four-star hotels, sleeping in plush, king-sized beds.

While we gathered our stuff, our mother pointed out that the motel was being renovated: TVs had been wheeled outside; bed frames and mattresses leaned against the walls; carpets rolled and stacked. Our room, however, didn’t look like it had been renovated since the place had been built, a very long time ago.

We set our luggage down and our father went to get ice, first thing, like he always did. I went to the bathroom, which was handicapped—bars everywhere and a sticky mat in the tub so you wouldn’t slip and bust your head, which made me not want to take a shower after all. I propped an elbow on a bar and listened to Elise complain. Only drug addicts wore black t-shirts, she said, and boys who ate foot-long sandwiches and read manga in the lunchroom. Girls like Elise didn’t even sit in the lunchroom—they sat in the little waterless ditch in the courtyard, their legs stretched out so they could get a suntan. They passed around bags of grapes and baby carrots because they found eating in public humiliating, and if they had to do it, they would eat only foods that were clean and neat.

I opened the door and scooted past them, peeled the spread off the bed closest to the bathroom. It was smooth and silky on top but pilled underneath. I peeled back the top sheet and looked for the short black hairs that were often woven into the thread. I didn’t see any so I got in and pulled the sheet up to my chin. It smelled clean, like bleach, and I thought of a show I’d seen about pests people couldn’t get rid of. The family with bedbugs had closed them up in a suitcase and carried them home from a motel just like this one. The bugs were hardy and adapted to survive, moving up and down the stairs on the children’s stuffed animals.

I listened to the sounds of renovation—things falling and being ripped out—while Elise and my mother droned on in the background. My mother spoke in the slow, controlled voice she’d been using a lot lately, a voice that begged us not to give her a hard time.

I got out of bed, opened the door, and stepped outside. The motel was two-story and horseshoe-shaped, the lot nearly full. I didn’t see my father. A worker stepped out of the room next to ours; he was small and covered in a fine white dust.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Putting in carpet,” he said.

I nodded and we shared a moment.

“Do you want new carpet in your room?” he asked.

I tried to think of something to say. Did he think we lived here? “Not today,” I said, and he went back into the room he’d come out of. I closed the door and got back in bed. I wasn’t gathering enough information. I tried to think of what else I could have asked him but couldn’t come up with anything. I’d have had to start at the beginning. What was his name? Where was he born? Did he have a wife? Kids? But all of these things seemed meaningless.

“Fine,” Elise said. “I’ll wear King Jesus tomorrow if you wash it. I’ll wear it for the rest of my life if you want.”

“Jess, get me the detergent out of my carry-on,” my mother said. “Come on, take ’em off.”

We took off our shirts and threw them at her. Then we put on the Old Navy tank tops we liked to sleep in, fast, before our father returned. They were Christmas-themed—mine was red with white snowflakes and hers was white with red candy canes. For some reason, we only thought to buy them at Christmas.

“I wish you’d just let me stay home,” Elise said. “We’re working on a new routine and I’m going to be behind.” She sat at my feet and fell between my legs. I kicked and scooted over and she came clambering up the bed and stuck her face in mine.

“We’re not going back,” I said, as dramatically as possible.

She put her finger up my nostril.

“Stop molesting me,” I said, throwing the covers over my head.

I didn’t want to go to heaven if Elise wasn’t going to be there. I’d have to take my chances on earth. We’d make our way home and find Cole, or he’d find us, and then we’d locate the key to the gun case and catalogue the contents of the pantry before planting a garden in the wide, flat backyard, the place where we had always imagined a pool. She’d give birth to a healthy baby girl, or maybe a boy—our own boy. And I’d work hard all day and at night I’d be so tired it wouldn’t occur to me to sleep badly. But then I thought about every postapocalyptic movie I’d ever seen and how we wouldn’t be able to stay there because men would want our guns and our food. They’d want us to have their babies in order to repopulate the world, all of the pretense of love gone.

“Forget it,” Elise said, sitting up abruptly. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not wearing it again until Saturday, you can tell Dad that.”

“Tell Dad what?” our father asked, opening the door. “You’re wearing those shirts, they cost me twenty dollars.”

“Each?” I said.

“That’s right, each. There’s only one ice maker working in this entire motel. This wouldn’t happen at a Days Inn.” He set the bucket on the table. He was partial to Days Inns. He had brand loyalty: Colgate, Maxwell House, Ivory soap.

“You’re the one who stopped here,” Elise said.

“I don’t like Days Inns. I always find little nests of hair in the bathroom,” I said. “It’s like they don’t even pretend to clean it.”

“But the ice makers work,” he said. He took off his glasses and held the bridge of his nose. Then he opened his eyes and looked blindly around the room. I hardly ever saw him without his glasses—he looked like someone who had been asleep for a long time and had just woken up.

Our mother squeezed the water out of our shirts while he chased a fly around the room with a newspaper. Then she went to the bathroom and did her business, silence punctuated by long airy farts, as our father continued to pursue the fly. Elise and I watched him with the blankest faces we could muster. When our mother came out, she washed her hands and made their drinks—a Sprite for herself and a whiskey for our father. She tried to hand the cup to him, but he was busy taking everything out of his suitcase: stacks of no-iron shirts, bundles of socks, a pile of tighty-whities.

In the doorway, they turned to us.

“We’ll be at the pool,” our mother said. Our father took a sip of his drink and made a face like it was too strong before closing the door.

“Finally,” Elise said. “Good Lord.” She rocked back and forth so the headboard knocked against the wall.

I searched for something to listen to on my iPod, scrolled through each of my playlists. Before leaving Montgomery, I’d made a Heaven mix and Elise had made an End of the World mix, but I was already tired of the songs I’d chosen. I decided on a mix labeled Jogging, though I never jogged. It hurt my knees.

Elise got out of bed and turned the air conditioner on high, checked the closet for extra pillows. She found one and launched it at my head.

“I can’t believe they left the liquor. Is this some kind of test?”

“What?” I asked, taking out an earbud.

“Maker’s Mark,” she said, “whiskey.” She took the bottle out of our mother’s carry-on and held it up to the light like she might find something floating.

“Put it back.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t drink,” I said.

“I’ll put some water in it and they’ll never know.”

“That’s not why,” I said. I’d found the First Response box in a trash can in Biloxi, faceup, like she’d wanted me to find it. That day, our father had stopped driving after a couple of hours and we’d spent the afternoon feeding the seagulls on the beach; they’d taken the chips right out of our hands. When I confronted her, she set the plastic stick on the table—the lines so brightly pink they glowed. Then she called Pizza Hut and paid for a half-veggie-half-sausage with her own money. I hadn’t asked any questions, how far along she was or if she might want to keep it. We ate the entire pizza while watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the old one with Gene Wilder.

“Life occurs at conception,” I said.

“Do you just repeat everything people tell you?”

“I’ve thought about it plenty. And it doesn’t matter when the baby becomes a baby. If you let it grow long enough, it’s a baby. This debate about when, exactly, it becomes a baby is stupid.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“And you just repeat everything people tell you, too. Only it’s the opposite thing I repeat.” I thought I’d made a good point, which she confirmed by not saying anything. But maybe she wouldn’t have to go through with it—she wouldn’t have to have the baby or kill it—because we’d be saved. And after we were saved, the great storms and fires would descend upon the earth and then the earth would explode, and after it had exploded, it would be sucked up by a black hole followed by a quiet that was so quiet it would blow your eardrums out.

I wanted to believe we were special. I wanted to believe all of it—heaven and happiness and joy unlike anything I’d ever known.

“Okay,” she said. “Life occurs at conception and we’re going to heaven and it’s going to be fucking awesome.”

“You have to believe it.”

“I wish you’d stop telling me what I have to believe. I’ve never been to church once—not once—and felt the presence of God, or anything else. So what exactly do you want me to believe in?” She handed me a cup and sat on our parents’ bed.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

“So don’t drink it. Answer me, what should I believe in?”

“It’s about faith. You have to have faith,” I said, realizing it was my own faith that was the issue. Elise had already decided God didn’t exist and she was okay with it. I wanted to go back to the time when I hadn’t thought about whether or not I believed, when I’d gone to church and Sunday school and passed out tracts and it never occurred to me to question any of it. Now everything was in question, all at once, and it mattered.

“What about you?” she said. “Do you feel the presence of God when you’re in church, or do you just stare at peoples’ asses and try not to yell curse words at the top of your lungs? Because that’s what I do. Or I play hangman with you. I like those little sushi pencils.”

I stuck my tongue in the cup—whiskey on ice, undrinkable. I didn’t say anything, but she kept looking at me, waiting. “I count colors,” I said. “How many people are wearing purple or yellow or green?”

“That’s just sad.”

“It’s always some odd color that everybody’s wearing, like half the congregation woke up and decided to wear orange.”

“Wow,” she said. “You’re really boring. It must be really boring to be you.”

“Sometimes I count fat people or bald heads.”

“Bor-ing.”

I spent most of my time, however, looking around at the other families, trying to determine how we stacked up. I looked at bodies and faces, hair and clothes and demeanors. We were usually pretty high up, because of Elise and my mother’s church involvement.

“On Saturday night, I’m going to take off all my clothes and leave them on the grass at whatever shithole motel we’re staying in, and then I’m going to hide in a bush and watch everybody freak out,” she said.

“Good for you.”

We sat there for a while, not saying anything. She drank her whiskey. I looked at my feet. I needed to do something with my feet.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know. Every generation’s predicted the end of the world. We can’t control war or unemployment or drug addiction or poverty but we can predict an end to these things, which makes them seem not so bad.” She picked up her phone and typed while I waited, fingering the birthmark on my thigh. It was pale and Jamaica-shaped. As far as birthmarks went, it was nice.

“Okay,” she said, “William Miller, a Baptist pastor, predicted the end of the world in March of 1844 but it didn’t come so he revised it to April and then that didn’t happen so he changed it to October. Jehovah’s Witness founder Charles Russell said the end would come in 1874 and then 1914 and then 1918 and finally 1975, which would be so long after he was dead he wouldn’t have to worry about changing it again. And then this guy, Marshall, has also predicted the end before. And when he’s wrong a second time, he’ll say he miscalculated and give us a new date—man’s miscalculation, not God’s, of course, never God’s—and we’ll be doing this all over again.”

“Not me,” I said.

She set her phone down. “Now let’s pretend we’re on vacation and having fun.”

“I am having fun,” I said. My bra strap slipped down my arm so I unhooked it and pulled it through my shirt. All of my bras were hand-me-downs from Elise, too small and worn out. “To the Pacific Ocean,” I said, raising my whiskey. “May there be dolphins and no jellyfish.”

We knocked our cups together, spilling some onto the floor, and brought them to our lips. I kept mine clamped tight. I’d had alcohol before but I’d never been drunk. At parties, I’d go behind a bush and pour my drink out, or shut myself in a bathroom and dump most of it down the sink. I’d once held my can sideways like I was so intoxicated I’d forgotten how to hold it until a boy asked me what the hell I was doing and I’d found it didn’t work that way. I didn’t know how it worked, but I had seen what people could do when they were drunk—Shannon cried and locked herself in bathrooms. She’d once given a stranger a blowjob in a parking lot.

I watched the liquid on top of the carpet, not seeping in.

“I miss Cole,” Elise said, braiding a chunk of her hair. She could have been on TV she was so pretty. She was so pretty she had gone and gotten herself pregnant.

“I bet he’s depressed without us,” I said.

“Of course he’s depressed—they keep him locked up in a cage with his own shit and only let him out once a day.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“And I miss Dan.”

It occurred to me Dan might not be the father, that it might be Abe, but she wasn’t going to mention Abe because he’d broken up with her and started having sex with her best friend, Laura Lee, or maybe he’d been having sex with Laura Lee all along. The baby was Abe’s—I knew this suddenly and clearly—and for a moment I was glad. But then I felt like an awful person. If God could see my heart, I’d never be saved, and of course he could see my heart. He was God.

“Maybe if I’m holding Cole in my arms he’ll get to come with us,” I said. “Like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

She stacked her pillows and readjusted. “These pillows are too high. I knew we should have brought our own.”

“But we’d forget them and the maids would give them to their grubby children.”

“I’m going to get a crick in my neck,” she said.

“That’s a funny word.”

She smiled at me and said, “I need to go to the store. Do you want anything?” But then she took the knife out of her pocket, opened it and started trimming the frayed pieces of blue jean from her shorts, making a little pile on the bedspread. She was the only girl I knew who carried a pocketknife. She’d found it while hiking. Our father said it was an excellent find—an expensive knife in good condition.

“Our movie’s about to start,” I said.

She held out her cup. “Hit me one more time and put some water in it.”

I poured more than I should have and she drank it down. “I wish you’d stay,” I said.

“I’ll be right back.” She took some money out of her wallet and folded it into her pocket. “If they come back, tell ’em I’m trying to score some weed,” she said, and went out the door.

I checked to see how much she had—fifty-eight dollars, nearly as much as I had. I took two fives and dropped them into my purse, and then carried the bottle to the bathroom and held it under the faucet, filling it past the level it had been. I thought about the Japanese girl and how she’d looked asleep but was probably dead, her insides a jumble of smashed organs spilling blood all over the place. I put the bottle back in my mother’s carry-on and looked around at the shirts dripping on the carpet, our clothes and shoes everywhere. Despite all our stuff, the room felt emptier than when we’d walked in.

I poured out my drink and rinsed the cups, put my toothbrush in one of them. Then I took my phone outside and sat against the door. The workers were gone, and other than a pair of goggles, there was no evidence they’d been there.

It was eight-ten and eight-twenty and eight-thirty and my parents would be back any minute. I was tired but knew I wouldn’t sleep well because I was thinking about how tired I was and how much I needed to get a good night’s sleep, which was exactly what you shouldn’t do. You should go about your business like you’re not even tired. You should stay out of bed as long as you can. I’d probably get four or five hours and wake up when it was still dark out, lie in bed waiting for the birds. Every morning the birds sounded different because they were different birds.

A man in a room across from me opened his door. He was black and muscled, tall and bald and handsome. He looked like a soap opera star.

He stood there for a moment with the light behind him, and then turned and said something to the woman in bed. She was plump and white with long dark hair, wearing only her panties. The woman gestured to the man to close the door, but he left it open, walked over to his car, and took something out of the trunk. Then he walked off in the same direction as Elise—toward the bar and gas station. The woman got out of bed with her breasts swinging and slammed the door.

A minute later, Elise came walking back across the parking lot with a paper bag in her hand, a cigarette burning brighter as she inhaled. She had a fake ID that said she was twenty-one. Once, she’d had me quiz her on the new facts of herself: height and weight and date of birth. She’d even memorized the license number, a long number that would only look suspicious if she rattled it off.

She sat beside me.

“You look homeless,” I said.

“A homeless man bought it for me,” she said, taking a swallow. “Or maybe he wasn’t homeless. He had a debit card.”

“Where’s your ID?”

“I don’t look anything like that girl.” She spread her legs, nearly to a full split, and I recalled the uncomfortable positions I used to sit in as a child, when my body could easily bend itself into different shapes.

“I thought we were going to order pizza,” I said.

“There’s a whole counter of fried shit over there—I could go get you something. Taquitos, chicken fingers, potato logs . . .”

“That’s okay.”

She swiped her cigarette on the bottom of her flip-flop and tossed it into the parking lot. “Don’t mess with Texas,” she said.

The bald man came into view, cradling a sack in his arms.

“When I passed him in the store, he grunted at me,” she said.

“What’d you do?”

“What do you think I did? I ignored him. You have to ignore them or they’ll be encouraged.”

The man opened his door and looked over at us before closing it. I wondered what he was saying to the woman—if they were kind to each other or if they yelled and said horrible things. They were probably on drugs, like my dead cousin. Like her, maybe they’d once had normal lives, with normal families who’d loved them and they’d just gotten off on the wrong track. Or maybe things had always been like this and they didn’t know any other way. Life was mean and people were mean and there was no room for kindness.

Elise lit another cigarette and called Dan. He didn’t answer, so she left him a message, said she was having a terrible, awful time. Then she checked to see what the Florida leg was doing. “Greta had a fender-bender,” she said, “smashed a headlight. And everybody’s giving her the finger today.”

“I bet she loves that.”

“Seriously, though—why are all these people so unattractive? Being religious is no excuse to be this unattractive.” She passed me her phone and I looked at the woman, overweight with messy gray hair, wearing a raincoat.

“Maybe she’s just unattractive and religious and the two don’t have anything to do with each other,” I said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“I’m sure there are a lot of ugly atheists out there, too.”

“She could at least dye her hair—she’s only like fifty or something. Or maybe forty.”

“Some women don’t care about being beautiful.”

She looked at me like I was insane. “The agnostics have to be the best-looking group,” she said. “Extremists rely too much on their extremism.”

I went inside and flipped through the stations until I found Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It was my favorite scene, the kids lost in the grass. They were so small a stream of dog pee was a river, a baby ant the size of a Volkswagen. They were so small, an oatmeal cream pie could sustain them for years. It was every kid’s dream, like finding a house made of candy in the forest. The older boy, Little Russ, was hot, even with his eighties hair, and I wanted to sleep in a Lego while he kept watch over me. No—I wanted him to forget his guard duty and climb into the Lego with me so I could run my fingers through his soft, feathered hair.

When I went to get Elise, she was gone. The lights were off in the bald man’s room and I imagined the woman straddling him while he held her hips, rocked her gently back and forth. At home, we had a set of my mother’s old encyclopedias and I would read and reread the entry for Sex: “A man and a woman lie next to each other and the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina. This is usually pleasurable for both parties.” It was the dirtiest thing I had access to. We didn’t get the premium channels and I didn’t look at porn on my computer because I might forget to clear the history. Of course I wouldn’t forget, but it was possible, and I’d never live down the shame.

My mother looked nearly girlish with her hair loose, smiling. She gazed up at my father and he leaned down and kissed her head. Occasionally, I caught glimpses into their world and it bothered me that I could never be a part of it, that I couldn’t know them in the way they knew each other. We all knew each other completely differently, in ways that would never overlap.

“Where’s Elise?” my father asked.

“I think she went to the store,” I said.

“What are you doing out here by yourself?” my mother asked.

“The moon is nice.” We all looked up at it, big and fake-looking with clouds snaking across it. My father had a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle that he liked to quote from. The book alleged that the moon landing had actually taken place in Nevada, and in between shooting footage the astronauts had visited strip clubs. Elise showed me a full-page spread of an exotic dancer as evidence that our father was an idiot. It was his thing, not believing in anything but God, as if to believe in anything else—man’s landing on the moon, global warming—would be disloyal.

My mother opened the door and I took off my shoes and got in bed. I watched my father take an envelope out of his bag. He unfolded the purple-and-orange prayer rug and knelt on it, facing the window. Before we’d left, he’d told us we each had to kneel on it at some point and circle our prayer needs and then he’d mail it to another family and they’d mail it to another family like a chain letter.

I’d knelt on it the first night and circled every single need: spiritual revival, devotion, monetary concerns, temptation, health and well-being, stress and anxiety, salvation.

On one side of the rug was a picture of Jesus’s face. His eyes were closed, but it said if you continued to look at them, they would open. They hadn’t opened for me and I wondered if they were opening for my father. I’d only glanced at them because it reminded me of standing in front of a mirror chanting Bloody Mary, something I’d done at a sleepover once that had freaked me out. It would have been horrifying if Jesus opened his eyes, same as it would have been horrifying if a Bloody Mary had appeared in the mirror. Had anyone in the history of the prayer rug seen His eyes open? And if they hadn’t, and no one was ever going to, why did it say that we would?

“Call her,” my mother said.

I liked the picture that popped up, Elise’s face in the plywood body of a meerkat at the Atlanta zoo. It rang and rang. I hung up and tried again, but there was still no answer so I left a message, trying to make it sound like she was on the other end. But then my mother asked where she was and I had to tell her I’d left a message.

“Maybe her phone’s dead,” my father said. Elise was always letting her phone die. I didn’t understand how peoples’ phones were always dying—all you had to do was plug it in at night. Who were these people who couldn’t even manage that?

“It’s not dead, it’s ringing,” I said.

“Well, try again.”

It went straight to voicemail.

My father sat at the table. “I need a pen,” he said, holding out his arm to my mother. She couldn’t find one and his arm stayed there, outstretched with his hand waving, while my mother dug around in her purse.

He looked at the prayer needs for a long time before circling one. I wondered which one. I didn’t like that our needs were going to get all mixed up, or that he knew I’d circled all of them. He left it on the table and took his robe into the bathroom, came out a few seconds later with it on.

“Turn it to the news,” he said, getting into bed.

My movie was almost over—Big Russ getting test-zapped by the machine—but I flipped around until I came to the news, the weatherman giving tomorrow’s forecast.

“I kinda miss that ole fat boy,” he said, which is what he called Brett Barry, the weatherman at home.

I plugged my phone into the charger and looked at my mother. I knew we were both thinking about last summer, in Destin, Florida, when Elise left the condo and didn’t come in until three o’clock in the morning. She’d come back to us so drunk she couldn’t stand or speak, and my mother had undressed her and put her in the bathtub.

We slipped on our shoes and went outside.

“Let’s pray real quick.” She took my hands, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. She asked for His protection and compassion and guidance. She asked Him to watch over us and keep us safe. “Mother Mary—” she said.

“Mom?”

She kept her head bowed, a tight grip on my hands. She was quiet for a moment. “Elise is too beautiful and naïve, Lord,” she said, and then she squeezed my hands once hard before releasing them. I wanted to be too beautiful and naïve. No one would ever apologize for me because I was too beautiful and naïve.

We walked slowly across the parking lot. It was quiet and the few lit-up rooms somehow felt lonelier than the dark ones.

Before entering the bar, my mother turned to me. I thought about the bottle of whiskey and how I’d put too much water in it. How I’d done it on purpose. My father would take one sip and ask what she’d done to his drink.

She opened the door and we stepped inside. The place was small, with a couple of video games on one side and a pool table on the other. I stood in the light of the cigarette machine and watched my mother approach the bartender. There were a dozen men, leaning and sitting around the bar, the kind of big, sad men who told a lot of jokes. There was only one other female in the place, a skinny woman playing pool with a short, tattooed guy. While taking aim, the guy met my eyes and I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I’d forgotten to put my bra back on. He took his shot, balls knocking into the pockets.

Though everyone else had noticed us, the bartender pretended not to. He was doing something below the bar I couldn’t see, washing glasses or drying them. When he finally acknowledged my mother, they spoke a few words and then she walked back over and stood next to me.

“She was in here, but she’s gone,” she said.

“Where’d she go?”

“She left with someone. He doesn’t know him.”

“I bet he knows him,” I said. “I bet they all know each other.”

“Maybe he’s just passing through.”

We went outside and looked up and down the street. I felt sorry for my mother. She probably wished she was still Catholic, that she didn’t have to kneel on prayer rugs or talk about the end of the world all the time.

I sat on the curb and stretched out my legs. I hadn’t shaved since we’d left Montgomery, and my legs were hairy, especially around the knees and ankles, spots I always missed.

“The barstools were toilets,” she said.

“Toilets?”

“Raised up on a little platform.”

“I didn’t notice,” I said.

The door opened and we were joined by the couple that had been playing pool. I was conscious of my breasts again. I had large breasts for my frame, which I found humiliating because the boys in my class had decided large breasts weren’t attractive, that more than a mouthful’s a waste. The man lit two cigarettes and handed one to the woman. She had terrible skin, her hair in a sad ponytail.

“We’re looking for my daughter,” my mother said, stepping toward them.

“Good-lookin’ girl?” the man said, but then he seemed embarrassed.

“About five-foot-seven, I think her hair was in a ponytail. Was it in a ponytail?” my mother asked me.

“She had it down. She was wearing a tank top with candy canes on it,” I said, thinking about how pretty she looked in her tiny shorts and tiny shirt, her long arms and legs.

“She was here,” he said.

“Do you know where she went?” my mother asked.

“She left with Jimmy,” the woman said.

“Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.

There was a pause and she said, “What do you want to know about him?”

“They should be back any minute,” the man said. I looked at his arms, which were littered with tattoos—small, individual drawings like someone had doodled them in the margins of a notebook. I wanted to sit with him, have him go through them one by one. I was sure each of them meant something. Trashy people had tattoos that meant things.

“The bartender wouldn’t serve her,” the woman said.

“Why didn’t they get beer there?” I asked, pointing to the gas station. The woman shrugged. I fake yawned, hoping she’d catch it, but she didn’t. It worked best if you yawned just as you were passing someone, if the person hardly noticed you at all. I liked the idea that I could pass it to someone and they would pass it to someone else and my yawn could travel, cross state lines.

My mother started breathing heavily, like she was going to hyperventilate, and I thought I should go get my father, that he’d know what to do, but he hadn’t known what to do. He’d just gotten in bed and opted out of the whole thing. She kept getting more and more upset, and the man tried to comfort her, calling her “ma’am,” reassuring her that Elise would be back any minute. He told her he knew Jimmy and Jimmy was a fine guy, a good guy.

“Sit down, Mom,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her down. She sat next to me, so close her legs and arms touched mine. She was unhappy with us and I wanted to do everything I could to make her stay, to keep her. There was a part of me that had always been afraid she would leave. If I behaved badly, if I wasn’t good enough, she might decide we weren’t worth the trouble. I felt like I had to compensate for my father and sister’s behavior. I didn’t know why this burden had fallen to me, why I was the one who was unable to be herself, but it had always been this way.

The couple eyed us as they smoked their cigarettes and talked about a woman named Tammy. We learned all about Tammy. Tammy had two kids and two boyfriends: one bad, one good. She’d been in rehab, prison, and, most recently, the mental hospital. Now she was out and the cycle was repeating itself. She was with the bad boyfriend, wasn’t answering their calls. Her kids were going to be taken away for good. I’d always thought that bad luck turned, but some peoples’ lives seemed to be one bad-luck story after another with no turn. I picked up my mother’s hand. I didn’t know what to do with it once I had it, so I examined it for signs of aging. It didn’t look too old. The bones felt nice under the skin. I turned it over and traced her head line, her heart line; her life line was weak, tapering off mid-palm.

“Do you miss being Catholic?” I asked.

“God doesn’t care where you worship him as long as you go to church.”

“But Catholics are different.”

“They’re Christians,” she said, “same as us.”

“Dad doesn’t think so.”

“I know,” she said, putting her arm around me.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. We said “I love you” a lot, and it hadn’t seemed like a big deal until my mother told me she’d grown up in a family that never said it. When her father died, she hadn’t heard those words come out of his mouth.

I was about to go get my father when we saw the car. We watched the headlights come closer and closer and then Jimmy pulled up right in front of us and my sister got out. The man looked at us through the windshield. He was old, at least forty, and didn’t look like anyone Elise would have voluntarily gone off with.

While our mother stood there with her hands at her sides, my sister dragged me into the bar; she led me to the bathroom and locked the door. The bathroom was one room with two toilets and no dividers between them. There was writing all over the walls: sketches of women’s faces, penises and liquor bottles, cats and rainbows and balloons. A sentence in blue marker caught my eye: IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU SHOULD GO HOME NOW. And then, underneath it in big block letters, LOVE ONE ANOTHER. This struck me as hugely profound—love one another. It seemed so simple. I was hardly ever even nice to people because I was afraid of them. It seemed ridiculous that people might need or want my love.

A red lightbulb over the sink gave the room a creepy feel, like we were being filmed, the camera’s eye turning slowly to follow our movements. It reminded me of a TV show I’d seen where seven people had been kidnapped and drugged. They awoke in separate hotel rooms on the same floor and couldn’t get out of their rooms until they’d found their keys, which were taped inside their Bibles. They had to kill the other six people in order to survive.

“I just wanted to see how pissed mom is,” she said.

“She’s really pissed,” I said. “She’s really upset. Why do you have to do stuff like this?”

She pulled down her shorts and sat on one of the toilets. “Like what?”

“You’re being an idiot.”

“Don’t call me an idiot,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. You’re an idiot.”

“Mom was crying in front of those people,” I said.

She was so drunk her face was taking on different shapes, the muscles bunching and flattening beneath the skin. As soon as she’d gotten her shorts up, I opened the door. The bartender was standing there with our mother behind him.

“Get out,” he said, and Elise started screaming that we were leaving.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What are you sorry for?” Elise said. “You’re always apologizing for things that have nothing to do with you. Nothing has anything to do with you.”

Our mother grabbed her by the arm and jerked her around, hair flying. Everyone was looking at us. They were still and quiet except for the jukebox, which was loud. It was weird, all of these trashy people looking at us like we were the trashy ones. We were solidly middle class. Our parents were college-educated.

The bartender hustled us out the door and we stood there for a second before our mother started walking. We trailed behind her like little ducks, Elise carrying her flip-flops in one hand. There was a lot of glass in the parking lot, but I didn’t tell her to put her flip-flops back on. It was car-window glass, the pieces small and shimmery blue, and probably wouldn’t cut her.

Elise tripped over a hunk of concrete and I linked my arm through hers. She had her face to the sky, mouth open. She pointed up at something while I dragged her along, my eyes searching out the curved and shiny glass of beer bottles. The temperature had fallen and there was a breeze. It was so nice out that I wished we were driving at night and sleeping during the day. There was nothing to say we couldn’t, there were enough 24-hour gas stations to see us through, but of course my father wouldn’t go for it. He didn’t go for anything out of the ordinary. He liked for things to be the way they were supposed to be.

“I want that ID,” my mother said.

Elise handed it over without protest and my mother slipped it in her pocket. I scanned the motel to see if any lights were on: two rooms. What were the people in those rooms doing? Watching TV? Having sex? Somehow, it was more interesting to think about what people were doing when the options had been narrowed so drastically, like I might guess correctly.

Our father was asleep, his robe in a pile on the floor and the covers at the foot of the bed. His stomach was hard and tight, like a pregnant woman’s belly. Our mother sighed as she took off her shoes and shorts and replaced the covers. Elise went to the sink and guzzled water out of her hand. Then she went to the bathroom, coughed a few times, and was quiet. I got in bed and waited. After a while, I went over and put my hand on the bathroom door, leaned in. She was crying. Like our mother, she would cry if she was sad and didn’t care who saw or heard her. The last time we watched Forrest Gump, she’d bawled shamelessly throughout the entire movie and I’d had to go upstairs and finish it in my room.

“Elise,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Elise.”

“Go away.”

I got back in bed. A few minutes later, she crawled in next to me and put her face close to mine. I liked to sleep on my left side and she preferred her right.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I hate it when you cry. It makes me sad.”

“There’s an angel looking out for me,” she said. She was so close that she could only look into one of my eyes at a time.

“What?” I asked.

“I saw my angel tonight.” She waited for me to say something but I didn’t want our mother to hear us. Our mother believed in angels but you weren’t actually supposed to see them. It was like the prayer-rug Jesus opening his eyes. He wasn’t going to and anyone who claimed he had was lying or dangerous.

“Tell me about it tomorrow,” I said.

She turned her back to me. As kids we used to fight to be the one who got to sleep on their preferred side, with their leg slung over the other’s hip, but that was a long time ago. I put the extra pillow between us and thought, love one another. It was so simple. How was I always forgetting something so simple? If Jesus’s message had to be reduced to one thing, that would be it.

Soon everyone was asleep and I was awake, listening to the steady, slightly ragged breaths of my sister, the snores of my mother and father. I liked to be the last one to fall asleep, the last one to see the last thing to happen in the day.