Dad’s Super Sport Impala convertible, a large car already, seems much larger now that Mom is driving away from him. The beater doesn’t exactly have a great running record, so it sort of seemed weird to me that Mom chose this as her getaway car. Blair, he’s my older brother, asks Mom, “Who’s going to fix the Impala when something stops working?” At this point we’ve been driving for a long time, maybe an hour, and I think both Blair and I had it in the back of our heads that Mom is just driving to show off, to make a point, and that as soon as she gets to Wenatchee she’ll turn around. Mom doesn’t even stop for the red light in Wenatchee.

“We can always find a mechanic dying to help me,” Mom says. “I take one look at the way I lived with your father, at his house with his dear old fruit trees that don’t bare fruit; the mossy roof that doesn’t keep out the rain; the three rusted out Chevies on blocks in the pasture that don’t run; I realize I’m not that kind of person.”

Blair, he’s my older brother, calls her on that right away. “But Grey and I are those kinds of people. We grew up with those cars in the pasture.”

“You’re not grown yet.” Mom reaches over to pat Blair on his head. He ducks and checks his hair in the rearview mirror. “Your father,” Mom says, “is that kind of people. We aren’t. We care about one another and like to read books and sing even though we’re pretty bad at it, don’t we?”

I cover my ears and say, “That’s not a cue to sing ‘California Dreaming,’” to get us out of this line of questioning. Blair can go off the handle if he thinks someone is putting him down.

Mom launches her off-key warble. Blair rolls his eyes and I smile but after about two minutes I wish Mom would calm down. She keeps going because she knows after another minute or so we’ll join in just because if we’re making all that noise, too, we’ll enjoy it some. Anything, up and to and including singing along with Mama Cass Elliot, is better than listening to my mother singing alone to Mama Cass Elliot.

I don’t really understand what Mom means about her not being that kind of person. Everyone is like everyone else, as far as I can tell, so all of this talk about kinds of people doesn’t really mean much to me. Given a choice, everyone is going to want donuts and hamburgers.

I do know it’s cool to be in Dad’s car without him. Blair sits in the front seat with Mom, and they play music on the radio Dad would never let us play. I have the entire back seat to myself. I spread out, stretching my legs from one end to the other of the long bench. Blair rolls the dial until he finds the song he’s stuck on. It’s John Cougar Mellencamp’s song called “Jack and Diane.” I can tell Mom already hates it, even if she plays along like everything we’re doing right now is great. Instead of screaming or turning the radio off or doing anything we would expect her to do, she sings along with the song.

“Cut it out, Mom,” Blair says.

He starts to get pissed because Mom makes it sound really goofy. This is a little ditty about Jack and Diane, the song goes, but Mom throws in this uh-huh in a deep voice between “Jack” and “Diane.” This is a little ditty about Jack uh-huh Diane.

“Mom, I’m serious. That’s not cool.”

Mom keeps it up until Blair snaps the radio off.

“Kids,” Mom says in her deep voice, like she’s planning on doing something and I wish she would because when Blair gets like this, no one can tell what he’s going to do. He folds the sports section over his face and lays back in the bucket seat. The wind jumping around the convertible keeps the paper plastered to his face. I just sit on my hands, waiting until we get wherever we’re going. I think about Dad in Grandma’s house, where Mom left him sitting at the kitchen table. He didn’t even come outside when we left. He’d been busy rolling a joint and tapping his foot to an old harmonica blues song playing on his portable tape player.

Blair was the first to run away. We didn’t know where he’d gone. Dad said, “Well, the boy is grown. He’ll get in touch with us once he gains his feet. Kids always do. He’ll need money for a deposit or something.” When Blair finally came back from wherever he was, Dad was angry. “Why in the hell are you leaving if you aren’t ready? This ain’t a flophouse. You think your mother and I didn’t have to work to get where we are? To get this house? To get this car?” When Blair come back it was almost like he’d left something behind only he didn’t know what it was. He was always trying to see if I could figure it out. “Things used to be so cool,” he said. “And now they suck.” I thought when Mom packed Blair and me in the car at Grandma’s it was in order to find whatever it was that Blair had lost. When Blair and I were really little we once went swimming in the gravely North Fork of the Snoqualmie River, way up the rapids, along the old logging roads, over the rickety trestle bridges. Out of the smooth, heavy river stones I built a castle in the middle of the shallow stream. In the middle of the castle, I had an enclosed lake. I floated my wooden toy blocks in the still water and admired how still they bobbed up and down on the silvery water when all around the thick castle walls the cold river gurgled and hummed as millions of gallons of water just rolled on and on. One of the stones slipped free and all of the blocks glided into the rapids. I felt hot water trickle down my cheeks as I tried to catch up with the blocks in the swiftly running river. I lifted my foot up. I brought it down into deep current. I tried to stand on the rocks. The blocks spread out over the entire river. On the slippery stones, I could barely stand half a step from my castle. I dove for a bright yellow triangle and plunged into the knee-deep snowmelt, stood, and slipped again. The entire time the blocks raced away. I know big things have happened to me since, but whenever Dad would take Blair and me up the North Fork Road, I’d think about those blocks slipping away. I’d had them for as long as I could remember up until they just floated away, down the rapids, probably getting stuck in a mossy bank where their bright yellow, red, or blue paint would fade. I sort of thought Blair felt like that now, and he was angry because he didn’t know who’d taken this thing away from him. He thought maybe Dad had taken it, or maybe Mom had taken it away, or even me.

For lunch, we stop at a McDonald’s near a big city I’d never been to before. Mom says it’s Spokane and that it has the biggest railyards in the entire state of Washington. “Spokane,” she says, “was built by hobos who decided this place must be nowhere enough that they never left.” We drive through the drive-thru and sit in the parking lot. A lot of people must do that because as soon as we park, we’re looking over this huge field covered with rusting railroad tracks, rotting wooden boxcars, grimy warehouses, and trillions of telephone poles sent tiny birds from the electric wires. The birds are so dirty, when they land on the filthy parking lot asphalt they almost look invisible. Flocks of them dive at the car. Sixty-two of them skip across the hood. Their feathers tuff up and the white stuffing from under their wings spins into the air. Dad would have murdered us if we’d touched the turtle-waxed surface with one of our french fry greasy fingers. These birds land on the door sill, cheeping and chirping, and cocking their heads, pretending to be cute, even though they look like living dog turds. They keep coming. One bird gets stuck under the seat and Blair tries to kick it out. He sits up on the side of the car, throwing his french fries. They bounce off bird heads and other birds pluck the fries in mid-air with fifty other birds in hot pursuit. Finally, Blair rolls off the back of the Impala, and reaches past Mom, who must be frozen because the birds are so frigging ugly. Blair pulls the keys out of the ignition. He doesn’t seem to mind that he has just left his hamburger on the seat where the birds swarm like huge flies. Four of them rip the burger apart and another takes flight with the yellow wrapper.

Blair throws open the trunk. I think he’s going to crawl inside. Instead, he pulls out his yellow whiffle-ball bat and starts beating the sides of the car, something I can’t believe even if Dad isn’t here. He whacks the front of the hood over and over again and the birds fly up to the telephone wires. Some of them just sort of hover over him as he swings the bat. The whiffle-bat makes its hollow scream and nails a sparrow. The little bird drops onto the hood and rolls onto the pavement.

“Blair,” Mom finally says. “They’re gone. Come back in the car.”

Blair doesn’t even hear her. He stamps on the bird even though he’s wearing his new tennis shoes. He throws the crushed body at the electric wires and then he starts chucking rocks at them and screaming, “I’m going to kill every one of you!” Mom grabs Blair by his shoulders and he jumps around; his face is pale. Sweat runs from under his hair. His eyes are almost closed. Mom steps back and away from him. I don’t know if he’s going to hit Mom or what.

At last Mom says, “You go inside that McDonald’s and wash your hands. Those birds are covered in germs.” She hands him some money to buy a new hamburger.

“You don’t know anything about germs.” He leans down like he is going to tackle Mom or something and scoops up a handful of gravel and throws it straight up into the sky. The rocks hang high up in the air for a second and then scatter everywhere, bouncing off the car, rattling on the pavement, raining down on Blair and Mom. She grabs Blair by the back of his upper arm and drags him into the McDonald’s. As soon as he’s halfway across the lot, his shoulders droop, and I feel sort of sorry for him. The birds even stay away until he’s gone into the McDonald’s, and then they flock down from the wires, out of the shadows of the railyard, and cover the car.

Mom zips past cars on the highway. On the upside of the hills, she signals and swerves the convertible into the far lane next to the double yellow line. The warm air rushes over the car, rushing into the backseat. My ears ring. On one hill, we pass a slow moving dump truck filled with junked cars. In the Eastern Washington weather, under the heavy snow, under the bright summer heat, the chrome has rusted as brittle and brown as bacon strips.

Eastern Washington, the other half of the state, is dry, hot, and land locked. Visiting grandma, I often thought of her house as the place where I could see the clouds in the sky. The sky is large here. The surface of the prairie rolls on and on like rocky ocean swells. Western Washington, where I am from, is damp, cold, and never more than an hour from sea water. Puget Sound isn’t the open ocean, but I can still find tidal pools with starfish, kelp, and seaweed with woody floater knots. All day long, Mom drives across Eastern Washington on the highway. I don’t know where she is going. Maybe she is running away but it seems unlikely she is going to get anywhere if she’s dragging Blaire and me along. The dry wind whips across my face, and I drink soda, and I drink the water I put in the soda bottle but I am still thirsty. Just looking at the crooked fence posts and the sagebrush makes my mouth dry. Parched grass and empty gulches roll on and on until even a single dead tree is a relief.

Mom guns the Impala past the dump truck. The man driving it, his half-bald head surrounded by unwashed strands of stray hair, wears aviator sunglasses. He touches the tip of his index finger to the rim of the glasses and honks his horn. He wears a black T-shirt discolored by bleach stains. The exhaust pipe rising up behind the cab spills black smoke. The truck, with its wide tires and loaded body, strains up the grade.

Mom doesn’t even turn around to wave at the driver. She waves at him through the rearview mirror brushing the surface of the mirror with the tips of her fingers like she’s cleaning it. Mom wears a white dress and a light blue cardigan and her hair is tied behind her head with a piece of blue ribbon. It occurs to me then how she must see herself, a young blond in a convertible. It’s just that Blair and I sit there to total her image.

The Super Sport’s speedometer ends at 120 miles an hour, and the needle flaps against 80. “Faster, Mom,” Blair says. “Faster. Take off right off this hill.” We sail over the top, and although the car doesn’t lose contact with the asphalt, the seat belt is the only thing that keeps me on my seat. We sail down the hill. Blair howls and Mom turns back over to the slow lane because on this side of the hill the oncoming traffic has the extra lane. The engine made a gurgling sound and popped. Something is wrong with the car, then. We can feel it because instead of accelerating down the hill, the Impala begins to make a faint noise. We don’t slow down to fifty until we start to climb the next hill. We climb the hill at forty miles and hour. The car pops again and we pick up speed. We go down the next hill at forty miles an hour and finally the dump truck comes up to our bumper. This time, though, the man lays on his horn until Mom pulls the car over to the shoulder. Dust sprays up and fills the inside of the convertible with grains of sand. He doesn’t even look at us as he eases the truck over the double yellow line. I can’t see his eyes past his sunglasses; instead I see pillowy clouds moving along the Eastern Washington sky.

When the car slows down, it doesn’t regain its speed. Mom has the pedal all of the way to the floorboard and the car can barely go twenty-miles an hour. Mom guns the car, and it doesn’t do anything. It just revs up, and then idles down and that’s it.

“What’s wrong?” Blair asks. The radio starts to cut out, and then it goes dead. “Damn it.”

“The car is broken,” Mom says.

“I am not a moron,” Blair says.“ I can tell it ain’t working.”

“Ain’t, ain’t a word,” Mom says.

“Stop the car. I’ll fix it.”

“You can have a look, I guess. You won’t leave it in worse shape than it is.” She turns to see if any traffic is coming. A Ford pickup clears the top of the hill, now way behind us, and we are already climbing another hill. The red Ford starts to slow down and Blair jumps up and shakes his head. The driver waves and keeps driving on its way.

“Why did you do that?” Mom asks.

“We don’t need any guy like that interfering.”

“He could have given us a lift to the next town. We are going to need a mechanic.”

“I can fix it,” Blair says. He opens the hood of the car. The engine smells like gasoline and singed oil. A faint blue smoke hangs over the engine. Blair touches the hose coming out of the radiator. “Fuck.” He looks back to see if Mom heard him. She just rolls her eyes and watches the highway. Blair swaggers back to the trunk and takes out the whiffle ball bat, the suitcase, and finally finds Dad’s black toolbox.

“We had those in there?”

“Yep,” Blair says. He takes the tools out of the case, lays out a cloth, and then lays out wrenches and screwdriver and clamps, examining each one as he does this. After he has all the tools laid out and displayed, he nods and then begins removing pipes, and filters. He did something to a pipe. Finally, he put everything back together. Mom and I wait in the car, looking sort of scared at each other each time a car passes. Without even trying the car, Blair puts each tool away as precisely as he took them out. He scoots Mom over with a flick of his hand and sits down in her seat. He tries the engine and it fires and starts, kicking out clouds of blue smoke. “See,” Blair says. Another car, a station wagon, passes us, slows down and stops. “Get in the car,” Blair tells Mom.

“I’m driving,” she says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Blair says, but he steps on the gas and Mom has to throw herself in the bucket seat or she’s going to be left behind. The man by this time smiles and walks back toward us. His family sits in the car. They all have their Sunday clothes on. He wears a gray suit and black, shiny shoes. The man leans against the station wagon and Mom barely gets her door closed, or the door would have winged the man. Blair swerves out into the oncoming lanes and we are on our way. “See, the car is fixed. Dad wasn’t good for nothing. He could always get this heap moving.”

“Blair, I should drive.”

“Let me drive to the next town.”

“You just about ran that poor man down. He was trying to help us.”

“He was interfering. We didn’t need help. You may need help. But I don’t.”

Mom doesn’t say anything. She keeps glancing behind her, but there isn’t a car or anything. Blair drives with one hand on the steering wheel and changes the dial to find his song. When he finds what he is looking for, he nods his head in time to the beat and spreads his arm out over the back of Mom’s seat.

We pass a crossroads with a dented sign that points toward Moscow and another toward Missoula. “Go to Moscow,” Mom says. “They’ll have a mechanic.”

Blair turns toward Missoula. He accelerates and the car groans a long rising noise like a soda bottle that has been shaken. The car pops again. And then the actual animation of the car, whatever force kept all of that steel and iron and chrome and vinyl going had just kept going and left the steel and iron and the chrome and vinyl and us behind. “What the fucking damn shit hell,” Blair says. Blair slows the car down and barely gets it off the road. There aren’t any ditches here. The sides of the road fall all of the way down to the field. Rows of corn go on and on all of the way to the top of the next hill. Along the ridge of the hill, the irrigation tractors rise up like giant picket fences. The car comes to rest on the access road. Blair slams the horn down. He jumps outside and hollers, “Fuck!”

“Blair,” Mom says. “Please stop using that language.”

“You said those words don’t mean shit. Fuck is just a fucking blank fucking space.”

“They’re nonsense syllables, but if you said ‘apple pie’ the way you say ‘fuck’ or ‘piss’, I wouldn’t want you to use them either. People will identify what kind of person you are by the kind of language you use. They have nothing else to go on besides the way you look. And Blair honey, there isn’t anything you can do about that, blessed with your father’s look and all. But you can speak pleasantly.”

“Screw you too, Mom.”

“See? What kind of person do I think you are?”

“You’ve thought I was an asshole from the day I was born.”

“You were a sweet baby. You’re still kind of cute when you don’t use that urinal of a mouth. All you can do to let people know what kind of person you are is talk. Talk like the kind of person you want to be, and you will be that person.”

“What? If you were my mother, then where’s my Dad? Why do you always have to leave someone behind?”

“It’s very constructive of you to point out my mistakes.” Mom doesn’t even look at Blair. She stares through her reflection in the windshield. “Though you don’t appreciate it, I’m very aware that my mistakes hurt you. But just because I’m your mother, that doesn’t mean I’m the enemy.”

“Too fucking late,” Blair says. He jumps out of the car.

“Blair, will you stop using that filth. Blair, fix this,” she says. She opens the trunk and tosses the black case at Blair. He catches it. Mom doesn’t even look at him. She takes the bag of groceries and the blanket out of the trunk. We go out and sit on the knoll above the irrigation ditch. We don’t even listen to Blair cursing and making all of that noise. After we eat our lunch, Mom and I walk through the corn. We walk all of the way up to the row of irrigation tractors. At the top of that hill, we can see the same kinds of hills all around us. There is the highway going through this space, and all of those hills going on and on for as far as we can see, well, until the sky starts. A row of poplar trees grows just beyond the horizon. “That’s a farm house,” Mom says.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Wind break,” she says. At the car she asks Blair, “You fix that thing, yet?”

“Just about,” Blair says.

“What do you think is wrong with it?”

“This and that,” he says.

“Grey and I are going over to that farm house,” Mom says. “We’re going to get us a ride into Moscow. You want to come with us or stay here? We will be back.”

“Can I have the keys. Because if I don’t have the keys… I won’t be able to tell if I fixed the car or not.”

“I’m not giving you the keys.”

“If you don’t give me the keys, I’ll be forced to hot wire it.”

“Well, if that’s how it is,” Mom says.

“If I have to hot wire it, I won’t be here when you get back.”

“It’s not your car,” Mom says.

“It’s not your car, either. I figure, if it’s stolen already, then it’s fair game, ain’t it?”

“Ain’t ain’t a word,” Mom says.

Blair shouts at us as we walk up the access road toward those poplars, “When I hot wire this car, I’ll be long gone by the time you get back.”

David wears a blue shirt over a white T-shirt with the letters DAVID stitched into his pocket. A spiral notepad sticks out of his pocket. A fountain pen pinches the side of his pocket. “I like your pen,” Mom says as he writes down the information about our car. His hair is very short, even shorter than that of the pheasant hunters who used to camp in the woods behind our house. He wrinkles his eyes and they disappear under the flaps of skin over his brown eyes. “Thank you very much,” he says. “My mother always had a thing for writing instruments. She hated typewriters. She wouldn’t even use one when she worked as a secretary in an insurance office. You can imagine that didn’t go over too well. She was big on the human touch.”

He squirts a shot of greenish soap like a teaspoon of apple mint jelly onto his hands and rubs his palms together until he holds a ball of bubbles. Layers of ancient motor oil and unknown gunk coat the sink basin. When David rinses, his hands are callused and clean except for black crescents lodged into the rims of his fingernails. My father’s hand had the same red burnished calluses and always smelled like engine oil, a bitter buttery odor.

“Walt,” David says, “I’m going to go get these folks’ car.”

Walt peeks out from behind the hood of a truck and muttered something and then went back to work. A radio faintly plays. David drives a red tow truck that smells like plastic and coffee. Every time David racks the gearshift, I jump. Before we get out there, Mom warns David about Blair. “I have a sixteen year old son. He’s trying to fix the car.”

“Maybe it’ll be fixed.”

“He said he’d hot wire it and take off if I didn’t wait for him.”

“We can always hope,” David says, but quickly apologizes when we don’t laugh. “Sixteen years old is rough. Nobody escapes without doing something radically stupid.”

Before we get to the access road we find Blair walking in the middle of the road. He doesn’t even clear out of the way. “That’s him,” Mom says. David stops the truck directly in front of him.

Blair shields his eyes as he looks into the car. He jumps at the hood. David throws open the door and leans out to pull Blair down. As soon as Blair sees David, he starts to run. Blair jumps off the highway, the irrigation water and weeds rushing down the ditch. He runs. David keeps after him, though, and brings Blair down into the dusty field with a very professional looking tackle. He wraps Blair in some wrestling maneuver. Blair doesn’t even have his feet on the ground. Finally, Blair shouts something, and David sinks into the knee-deep dirt. David and Blair shake hands, and they walk back to the truck.

“Thank you, David,” Mom says.

“No problem, ma’am.”

“Linda,” Mom says.

“Pleased to meet you, Linda.”

“Now, shall we get the car?” Mom asks Blair.

“I kind of hot wired it,” Blair says. “And then drove it into the ditch. It’s about a half-mile up the road.” Where Blair had been sitting erect in the seat and glancing over the crown of our heads, he now huddled in his space in the cab of the tow truck.

“This is the greatest car America ever built,” Walt says. He wears blue and white pin striped overalls, with big brass buttons. Oil blackens his long, gray beard.

“America?” Mom says in a loud voice. “Don’t that mean the world?” Blair smiles at me because we know Mom is making fun of the guy, but he had to notice that it sounds like something he’d say himself. Walt laughs out loud when Mom says that, “Damn right. We’ll have your car fixed up by tomorrow.” He looks at David. “We have to get a new radiator driven in from Spokane.”

“Thanks,” Mom says.

Blair picks up a tool and Walter grabs his wrist. “Keep your paws in your pockets.”

“Mom,” I say, “we don’t have any money.”

“We have enough. Besides, people don’t always want money.”

The cinderblock motel we finally decide to stay at doesn’t have a swimming pool. It does have a Coke machine, a new one with Sprite and Coke and Welch Grape. Our room looks out over a field of young green corn, hardly up to my knees. Pools of standing water lay close to the motel. Algae coats the pools like organic oil slicks. Blair and I set out a row of cans at the edge of the field and throw the largest rocks we can find at them. They are about the size of grammar school marbles with just enough heft to actually throw the distance we want. They aren’t even heavy enough to knock the cans into the ponds. They glance off the stones and disappear into the water, breaking the algae for a second, and then the skin closes up. At last, I nail a can—bullseye—and it falls into the pond and floats there getting its sides covered with whatever that stuff is.

Mom leaves with David as soon as she drops us off at the motel. On the way over, she stops by the town grocer and bought two TV dinners and a carton of Neapolitan ice cream, so it isn’t much of a surprise to Blair and me when she says she was going to go out with David for a drink. Blair calls her on it anyway.

“You mean you’re just having a drink and you’ll be back for supper?”

“Honey, I only bought two TV dinners. You got that far in school. You do the arithmetic.” She scoops Blair’s face in her hand. Her nails close over his eyes like a cage, and she gives him a big, fresh lipstick smack on the lips.

Blair just stares at the grocery bag she leaves on the table. He doesn’t even wipe off the make-up or anything. He looks at me. “If she is going to go out with a man like Dad, why can’t it just be Dad? That would be a whole lot easier for everyone.”

For a while after Mom leaves, Blair is sort of nice. I can tell something is coming though. We go outside and throw those rocks and then finally, we go back inside. It is just Blair and me. He’s being real careful not to piss me off, so we have a good time because we don’t know if Mom is even going to come back or not. But Blair asks me after we eat the dinners and eat two bowls of ice cream each, “How much money do you got?”

“I haven’t had allowance in over four weeks,” I say. “I keep asking for a raise—but you know how it is.”

“Yeah,” Blair says. “I haven’t even had an allowance since I got back. I sure miss my allowance. I could buy all of the candy and video games and comic books I wanted. I sure felt like a great little bratty kid blowing my allowance on crap like that. Boo fucking hoo I sure miss my damn five dollars. It sure was great of those chumps to pay me five big ones for doing nothing except being a kid.”

The next morning, we walk across town to the coffee shop next to the garage. It has started to rain even though streaks of sunlight fall over the prairie. The puddles reflect the cloudy sky. Blair and I stand looking at those puddles while we wait outside the cafe. After a long, long time Blair goes into the cafe and then comes outside. “She’s gone.” He just says it and then we sit there, thinking maybe she has gone away with David and we won’t see her again. I start to get mad then because if she did leave like that, then she should have left us with Dad.

Just as we are getting ready to go to the highway to hitchhike or something, a sparkling blue Chevy Malibu pulls up, its engine puttering and blowing out a faint purple vapor. Mom staggers out of the car. Her hair is damp and pulled back into a single ponytail. “Thanks for the ride David,” she says.

“No problem-o,” David says. He doesn’t even look at Blair or me. He just drives out to the end of the parking lot, signals left, and takes a right turn.

Blair stands up into Mom’s face, on the balls of his Keds. “Where’ve you been?”

“It’s none of your business, all right, kid,” Mom says. That really pisses Blair off. He steps back then and I’m afraid he’ll go right off and hit Mom or something so I jump up and run around, “Mom’s back in town,” I sing. “Let’s get in the car and get going.”

“I’m not going anywhere with her, now,” Blair says. “She’s a whore.”

“Watch your fucking language,” Mom says.

“Fuck ain’t a fucking word.”

Mom slaps Blair. He slaps her back, right across the face, and we all stop moving then. It doesn’t hurt Mom any, but you can tell it wasn’t that it hurt so much as the fact that Blair has hit her. Not even Dad has done that before. Blair starts saying how sorry he is for having to hit her, but she hit him first. “Where’d you go? How were we supposed to know you’d come back?”

Mom won’t listen to him. He sits in the back seat once we get the car back. Mom and I play old songs on the radio, the songs I like because Mom knows the words to them. She won’t sing to them, though. I had thought when Mom packed Blair and me in the car at Grandma’s it was in order to find whatever it was that Blair had lost, but really I guess, it was to lose whatever she had found living with Dad, but the only problem was that since she was out she was bound to find something. She’d probably just find the same thing again. I think Blair knows that and that was why he came back, because at least at home he had us. Blair just sits back there, not sleeping or saying anything, even though he hates the music and I’m pretty sure, then, that he hates Mom, and probably hates me.

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This story was originally part of the manuscript for the The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. It was dropped and revised, and appeared in my collection The Moss Gatherers. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The Remains of River Names will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.