Back Roads Read Free Page A

to drift into my line of vision and pile up until I couldn’t see anything but cold white nothingness. Then I remembered he was dead.
    The girls were all asleep so I cleaned up the mess myself. I kept out the picture and was on my way to throw it in the outside can when something made me throw it in my truck instead.
    I never looked at it. Whenever I happened to notice it by accident, I buried it under the trash but it always managed to surface again: Dad in a white suit and a glossy shirt patterned injewel-toned splotches like a melted stained-glass window, way too much hair and collar, a Burt Reynolds mustache, a blood-red carnation in his buttonhole, grabbing Mom around the waist and grinning drunkenly at one of his off-camera buddies; Mom in a gauzy white handkerchief dress, a ton of eye makeup, long white feather earrings and ceramic Farrah hair, her shoulders kind of hunched together and her head tilted away from Dad’s breath, looking like she was trying not to throw up. I gave her a lot of morning sickness.
    I reached over with my foot and pushed the picture under the trash.
    The first half-mile of our road was straight uphill and the trees grew together over the top of it making a tunnel of leaves in summer, and a tunnel of snow in winter, and a tent of bare branches like charred fingers the rest of the year. Our house sat at the crest. Across the road was the clearing, stretching out green and smooth, then disappearing over a slope into a rolling sea of hills the color of rust and soot and worn yellow carpet. The power lines and the smoke-belching twin coal stacks of the Keystone Power Plant in the distance were the only signs of humanity. Whenever people asked me how we could stand to stay in the house, I told them I liked the view and then they thought I was even crazier than before they asked.
    Aside from Laurel Falls National Bank, the only thing that could have driven me away was the sight of the four empty doghouses. Every time I parked my truck and was greeted with silence instead of the barking chorus I had come to expect ever since I was old enough to put meaning to sound, I hated myself for failing them. But dog food cost a fortune. I managed to find homes for three and kept Elvis, my shepherd mutt. He was allowed to come inside now, but he was nervous about it. So were the girls. If anything could have brought my dad raging back from the dead it would have been the sight of a dog lying in the middle of his living room.
    Misty opened the front door and let Elvis out. She followed him and stood on the front porch, silent and expectant, fingering the pink rhinestones on the grimy cat collar she wore around her wrist.
    The collar had belonged to the kitten Dad got her for her tenth birthday. It only survived for two months before we found it shot in the woods.
    I remembered Mom taking the death harder than anyone. She burst into tears when she saw what was left of the blood-matted fluffy white carcass Misty had dragged back to the yard by its tail.
    She folded Misty into her arms and held her while Misty stood stiffly and stared at the body with her eyes a glazed brown like a medicine bottle. Then she knelt down and slowly unbuckled the collar and fastened it around her wrist while Mom’s hands still clutched her shoulders. Later Mom said she had been in shock.
    “Did you get my egg roll?” Misty called out, rubbing her thin bare arms at her sides and her stockinged feet against each other.
    I threw the bag. Elvis stopped in his tracks on his way to meet me and watched its flight. It fell on the frozen mud next to the steps and he bounded over to sniff it.
    Misty glanced at me, unsmiling, before she walked down to get it. I couldn’t tell if she was pissed or hurt or couldn’t care less. Her mask of freckles gave her the appearance of being more persecuted than she really was.
    I started across the yard and paused at the patch of cement with a sawed-off piece of pipe sticking from it where Dad’s