VenCo(58)

“Did you guys go on lots of trips?” Lucky was immediately softer. Any information about her father was welcome.

“When he was little. Me and Oswald would go just about anywhere we could get to in the car, all over. He’d be back there just sliding around the back seat of the Fairmont like the last bean on a plate.” She laughed.

“Wait, you didn’t strap him in?”

Stella shrugged. “Times were different. He made it through, safe enough. The hurts he suffered were self-inflicted. Me and Ozzy, we gave him everything, and he decided to go a different way.”

They stopped for shitty hot dogs and shitty ice cream and lots of shitty canned drinks along the way. They filled up at an old-school gas station that didn’t accept credit cards and had an ancient guy in denim coveralls manning the pump. Stella went to the bathroom each time they got off the road. Eventually it grew dark, and Lucky was so tired that holding the wheel required concerted effort.

In her exhaustion, a wave of anxiety about the whole future rolled over her. She had to make this work. There were no other good options. Soon enough, they would lose their apartment. Really, the only decision was about where Stella ended up. If they went back to Canada, either Lucky put her in a home so she could work full time—which might kill Stella—or she found a really cheap apartment and they both lived off government cheques—which would for sure kill Lucky. Driving into Pennsylvania, Lucky imagined feeding french fries to a catatonic Stella at a downtown McDonald’s, both of them staring vacantly into space.

Guilt has a way of showing up when it is least useful and settling in so that it’s hard to breathe. By the time they arrived in Schuykill County, all Lucky wanted was a drink to obliterate the shame that made it difficult to even look at her grandmother. Accordingly, she turned into a motel next door to a bar. She didn’t have to search for Rattler Ricky until the morning, anyway.

“This one looks good,” she said, pulling up to the office and parking.

“If you’re a serial killer,” Stella mumbled, wrapping her sweater tight around herself, eyeing the almost-empty parking lot, the neon sign with half the letters fluttering like moth wings.

“We’re not exactly flush,” Lucky said. “Meena gave us a budget, and we’re sticking to it.”

“Who’s Meena? Is that a friend of your mother’s? You know I don’t like those people she hangs around with.”

“No, Grandma. Meena is the woman who sent us on this trip, remember?” She had parked and was already getting out of the vehicle. She was not expecting a response.

“Oh, Wendy’s wife. I like her. A bit of a snob, but she’s a decent enough egg.”

Lucky leaned back in. “You know who Meena is?”

“Sure, she’s Wendy’s wife . . . and Wendy is . . . my cousin?”

Lucky closed the car door and walked to the office.



For over an hour, she paced inside their musty room, then back and forth outside the door. What if Stella got up again and wandered away while she was at the bar? Wasn’t keeping an eye on her the whole reason she’d brought Stella with her?

The bar wasn’t exactly banging. A few people had walked in from the road while she’d been watching. One pick-up had parked with the engine running while the driver stormed inside and then came out, ten minutes later, dragging a very drunk man behind her. She stuffed him in the passenger side and slammed the door, yelling, “If you aren’t up for your shift tomorrow, expect to find your Xbox on the lawn.”

Other than that, it was pretty quiet.

“So what exactly is Rattler Ricky?” she’d asked Meena that morning. God, had it been that same morning?

“She is a Booker, of sorts.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Someone who keeps and passes on knowledge, usually written stuff, but also oral. Ricky’s more of an oral Booker.”

“So would you say she’s an oral expert?” Freya asked, stifling a smirk.

“No, I wouldn’t. Not to her face, anyway,” Meena said. “Bookers archive anything that could be useful, anything that can create maps—where we’ve been, where we need to go. Sometimes they gather, like in book clubs.”

“Wait, like book club book clubs? Like Oprah?”

Meena looked thoughtful. “I’ve sometimes wondered about Oprah. Wouldn’t it be amazing if she were one of us? Imagine the reach!”

“Maybe she has the seventh spoon.” Morticia was uncharacteristically excited.

“I don’t care at this point who has the seventh spoon, just that we find them, and soon.”



“Fuck it, I’ll just sit by the window,” Lucky said aloud. She jogged across the lot and pulled open the wooden door.

She had been in a lot of dive bars in her limited day, lots of tiny Greek pubs with two choices on draft, a few white-trash joints she left after one drink, and plenty of hipster bars set up to emulate both. But this one? It made the Trout Tavern look like the lobby bar at the Ritz-Carlton.

Except for the neon bar in the window, it didn’t even have a sign. The whole thing was more of a shack than a building. Exhaust from the road and the scent of cow shit from the field behind it filled the low-ceilinged room, mixing with the sour smells of old beer and unwashed skin. There were maybe a dozen people spread throughout, half at the bar, closest to the alcohol. Two played a slow game of pool on a duct-taped table in the back corner, and the rest sat as singles at different tables, the international sign of a real drinker. Alone. Focused.