Don't Fail Me Now(40)

“He’s making a family tree for school,” I say.

“Yeah,” Cass deadpans, “this trip is for extra credit.”

“So are you my sister?” Denny asks.

“No,” Leah says. “You have to have at least one of the same parent to be siblings.”

“Hey,” Tim says, feigning injury.

“So you’re her brother . . .” Denny says, starting to piece his puzzle together again.

“Stepbrother,” Tim corrects. “My dad married her mom.”

“Do you and I have the same dad?” Denny asks hopefully.

“No,” Tim says with a smile. “I wish.”

“Oh.” Denny thinks for a minute. “But if they have the same dad, why does she have a different mom?”

“You wanna take this one?” I ask Tim with a smirk.

“No, ma’am,” he laughs. “All yours.”

“Well, our dad kind of . . . switched moms,” I say. It sounds silly reduced to first-grade vocabulary, but I know it’s still a trigger subject for Cass, so I glance back to check on her. Amazingly, both she and Leah are smiling a little bit, staring out their respective windows.

“You’re allowed to do that?” Denny asks incredulously, and Tim stifles a laugh.

“If you’re a jackass,” Cass mutters.

“So he switched from our mom to her mom?”

“Yup,” I say, biting my own lip to keep from grinning. I really don’t know why it all seems so funny coming out of Denny’s mouth, but I’m grateful for the levity.

“And then her mom switched from our dad to his dad?”

“You got it, buddy,” Tim says, barely holding it together.

“Was our mom mad?” Denny asks. Now even Cass is laughing.

“I think she’s still mad,” I say, and Denny gives me a big, one-front-toothless grin. And I know it’s really not funny, but for some reason a surge of laughter I’ve been holding in for the last few minutes—days, months, years, who’s counting?—finally comes, and I throw my head back and let it wash over me like a new kind of tidal wave, breaking me open, shaking my whole body like it’s trying to set me free.

? ? ?

We drive for hours under the vast sky of Illinois, fat clouds drifting lazily overhead, past the lush forests and rock faces of Missouri, breezing through the northwest corner of Arkansas straight into the plains of Oklahoma right as the sun decides to set in all kinds of sherbet colors in front of us like a drive-in movie. All of our phones are turned off (Devereaux rule #1,000,001: When on the lam, technology is your enemy. Submitted to the official rulebook by M. H. Devereaux, April 27th), so there’s nothing to do but talk or listen to the radio, and we do some of both, blasting whatever half-decent station is coming through with the least amount of static, catching pockets of Pharrell or Taylor Swift or twangy country ballads that I see Tim lip-synching along to. When the radio craps out or somebody rejects the available music, we start to talk, the conversation forced at first but then finding its legs, starting to flow. We find out that Leah plays clarinet and only got her braces off two months ago; that Tim led the SkeleTone Crew to a Northeast Regional Championship with an a cappella arrangement of “All About That Bass”; that they have a Labrador named Nemo; that Jeff and Karen aren’t home much and that most nights, Tim and Leah eat microwave burritos and watch TV by themselves. So much for the magic of the white picket fence. Leah mostly wants to know if we see a lot of shootings in our neighborhood like on The Wire, and what’s really in the ground beef at Taco Bell, but Tim asks more about our schools and home life, and while I try not to go into the details, I do get Cass to do some of her Aunt Sam impression, which gets us all cracking up again.

There’s real terror, of course, lurking below the surface. I know we’re in uncharted waters now and that all of the things that were worst-case scenarios yesterday—running out of cash, begging for food—are now best-case scenarios, replaced by the new and infinitely more chilling worst-case scenario of being arrested and charged with grand theft auto and child endangerment and watching my siblings retreat into specks from the back of a police cruiser. They’ll try to split you up! Don’t let them split you up!

But the more miles we put between us and the hotel parking lot, and the more the general mood in the car improves, the more I’m able to push that fear down. In a fit of denial, I even make Tim stop at a Walmart in Tulsa so I can get a little $15 five-by-five dome tent and a couple of cheap polyester blankets for the kids to sleep on. I’m down to $101.87. There’s no amount of math that can make that stretch till Sunday.

“It’s better than the trunk,” I say as I pass my gifts around, and Leah actually squeals with glee.

We follow signs to a free campsite in Bristow, pulling up to the edge of Lake Massena just as the last of the purplish dusk gives way to night. It’s basically a beach, with a grassy area and a picnic table but otherwise just endless pebbly sand up to the lake, and so while Tim sets up the tent on the grass and Cass gives herself her shot, Denny, Leah, and I kick off our shoes and run down to the water’s edge to stick our toes in the cold black waves that are lapping at the shore under the light of a full, yellowy moon.

“This is better than the hotel,” Denny says, and I rustle his hair and let him splash algae onto my jeans with his overexcited stomps.