Back Roads Read Free

lasted a week and then, as if to punish the worms and the girls for their optimism, the weather had turned brittle cold. I blew in my hands and rubbed them together, then stuck them under my armpits while I walked quickly to my truck. I didn’t know why I was hurrying. The heater didn’t work.
    The county Behavioral Health Services office was in the same long, low, brown brick building as the DMV and the animal control office. Across the intersection was the Eat N’ Park thathad driven Denny’s out of business (even Grand Slam breakfasts couldn’t compete with Eat N’ Park pies) and the strip mall with Blockbuster Video, Fantastic Sam’s, the Dollar Tree, and a Chinese restaurant called Yee’s. I always stopped at Yee’s after my appointment with Betty.
    Jack Yee, the guy who owned the place, bobbed his head and smiled deliriously when I walked in and his wife did the same, waving from a far corner where she always sat at a table reading a newspaper. I feared I was their best customer, and I only came in once a month and bought a two-dollar egg roll.
    Jack tried pushing the General Tso’s chicken on me.
    “Spicy, spicy,” he said, grinning.
    “No, thanks,” I told him, even though I was starving and all I was going to get at home was blue box mac and cheese and hot dogs. It was Misty’s night to cook. She was twelve.
    He gave me Jody’s umbrella and cookie for free and asked about her. He and his wife had only met her once, but they were blown away by her. They couldn’t stop touching her hair. It fell all the way down to her butt and was the same color as the gold letters stamped on church hymnals.
    All the girls had long hair—including Mom—but Jody’s was the most admired. Mom’s was the reddest. Misty’s the most neglected. Amber’s the most likely to smell like a rank old blanket from the back of some guy’s pickup truck.
    I took the little brown bag and sat it next to me in my truck, then spent the half-hour drive from Laurel Falls to Black Lick watching the grease stain grow from the egg roll pressing against the paper. I wanted to eat it more than anything in life. I rolled down the window to try and get rid of the deep-fried smell, but I couldn’t stand the cold. By the time I took the final bend leading home, I was driving so fast the old Dodge Ram was shuddering.
    Ours was the only house on Fairman Road, an unpaved two-mile shortcut connecting two parts of a county road thatdoubled back on itself. Locals called it Potshot Road because before my dad had started piecing together our house at the top of it, so many deer gathered in the clearing any hunter hiding in the trees could take a potshot and hit something. Every hunting season, Dad had to lock up the dogs in the garage and Mom made us kids play inside for fear of getting shot. I never felt safer than those days Amber and I spent hiding beneath a blanket-covered card table playing war and listening to the crack of rifles outside and the calm blasted silence that always followed.
    The deer had thinned out the past couple years though. Even the stupidest animal could sense when a place had gone bad.
    The truck bounced over a rut, and the egg roll went flying off the seat onto the floor, where it landed on top of a bunch of empty fast-food coffee cups, crumpled McDonald’s bags, and a cheap gray windbreaker with Barclay’s Appliances written across the back. One of Jody’s dinosaurs was down there too and my parents’ wedding picture.
    I had found the picture stuffed in the bottom of a garbage bag a couple months after the shooting. The sharp corner of the cheap yellow-gold frame had poked a hole through the plastic and scratched me on the calf while I was standing in my underwear putting on a twist tie. The rip got bigger and garbage spilled out all over the kitchen floor and I had froze, bracing myself for the flat of my dad’s hand to connect with the base of my skull and for the tiny stars of light, like floating dandelion fuzz,