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  “I guess I probably need a good wash. I’ll ask Evadare for a towel, hey?”

  But instead of showering I went on sitting, clutching those fingers. Her eyes darted over my face, seeking to comprehend something, and I wondered if maybe because of Pipe #9 I was as unrecognizable from my old self as she was, so I started talking about George Reid’s classes at Hoover High and which kids were a pleasure and which gave me trouble. Her eyes settled on the side of my face. We sat quietly then, listening to the clatter from the kitchen and the kids’ voices just beyond the curtain.

  “Hey, yeah,” Grace was saying. “They wallpapered the light switches!”

  “It’s a valid design choice,” said Clint, “it’s a free country.”

  “No, c’mon,” said Franny, “if you’ve got to paper over everything, you’re covering deep emotional crap. I mean, how far does it go—the toaster?”

  A pause.

  “You’re right about the toaster,” said Harv.

  “Oh, I’ve got to see that!” A floorboard squeaking under Franny.

  “If you really think about it, though,” said Clint, probably tightening his scarf, “your whole life is one long design choice.”

  “Ooh,” said Amber. “Deep like Jacques Cousteau.”

  “Like, do you break your bro’s leg or don’t you?” Clint went on. “Decide.”

  “That paper on the toaster’s pretty singed around the edges,” said Harv.

  “The stuff is everywhere!” cooed Grace.

  I couldn’t help but smile. Mom’s eyes stayed on me.

  “I remember,” I whispered.

  When they’d moved into the Pawnee house she’d bought wallpaper that was five dollars a roll over their budget, with that seersucker pattern through it, and if there’d been three feet left over Dad would’ve locked her outside. So she’d even papered the shelf in the guest room closet.

  Mom was falling asleep, her eyelids drooping like drawbridges—no, now they came up again, but slow as a sunrise. Meanwhile I was wondering what Evadare had been eating off that empty plate on the shelf—must’ve been plain toast, I’d have smelled it if it’d been bacon—then suddenly, inexplicably, I calculated how quickly I could get through the picture window once the house caught fire, and if it would even be physically possible to haul Mom out after me. Would any of those five kids be able to haul her if I wasn’t there? Could Colleen? Because after a person got doused from Pipe #9, Old Man Penzler tracked them down, ran them over and set their house on fire, that was standard operating procedure. Maybe the odds were only one in a hundred that James Jones knew where we were, that he’d even narrowed it down to Pawnee County, but that still made it too risky to leave the kids with my mom and Evadare. That had been my plan, but as I held Mom’s damp washcloth I could clearly see it wasn’t a good one.

  “If he won’t let us find the Rob dude, we should frickin’ walk there! Clint, sit the fuck down, man!” Grace’s loudest stage whisper. “We can’t wander all over, think how rude you’re being!”

  “Sorry, Ma.” My free hand wiped her chin with the purple washcloth. “They’ve kind of got tempers, these kids.”

  English saddle, she’d always insisted as we’d strolled around Lincoln. I don’t want you raising cowboys.

  “Okay,” Evadare announced behind me. “The breakfast is served. They asked for bacon, but I’ll give you ham salad to take away. What did you want to ask about?”

  I got up and put an arm around her shoulders. Her eyes widened.

  “Changed my mind,” I said. “Forget it. After we eat I’ll make a phone call.”

  “Rob?” I tried to relax my voice, so it wouldn’t sound like the whole project wasn’t on his shoulders. “Peter Giller here. Calling you back.”

  “I’d been wondering about you—hey, three guesses what I’m doing right now!”

  I stared at the side of the guest-room bureau, papered with blue palm trees. I couldn’t feel my feet. Then I could feel them again.

  “Playing golf,” I guessed.

  “No.”

  On top of the bureau, a cut-glass dish held fragments of bluish windshield glass.

  “Eating bacon,” I said.

  “Dang, you’re not playing games. What do you want?”

  “I’ll be in Lancaster County in one hour.”

  “How many are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “Superlative. All with the same problem?”

  “One girl’s lost an arm, everybody else, not so extreme. Though to be honest, it’s our brains that need to hole up for a while. Been rough.”

  “Oh, it’s one and the same. Diet and attitude.” I pictured him waving a big hand back at Dockside, glorying in some esoteric contraption. “Where you coming in from?”

  “Pawnee.”

  “Tell your seven they’ll need clothes, toiletries, but food’s taken care of—oh, and as of now, we’re confiscating cell phones. All right, you got a pen?”

  “Hold on, before I forget, wait—have you got a girl named Megan Avery there? One of my students?”

  “Avery.”

  At his end, cutlery dropped onto a plate and I could hear him call out a question.

  “She’s learning the injector,” he finally said. “Megan. She’s on shift until two. Eyeball trouble, if memory serves.”

  When I came out of the guest room I heard Evadare’s voice at a higher pitch than usual, and hurried into the living room to see her steering Franny out through my mom’s bead curtain. The other four filed behind them.

  “Hey, life doesn’t last, Beanie Babies.” Franny grinned, her big bracelets clanking together, and tried to show Evadare her phone. “We got to document it, right?”

  “Give her privacy,” Evadare snapped. “Her dignity!”

  I slipped through the curtain.

  “Sorry about that, Mom,” I said softly. “You all right in here?”

  She seemed to be studying the set of orange Childcraft books on the bottom shelf. She wasn’t capable of reacting to any situation. In the middle of the spectrum between mother and her freakish son was a single functioning person.

  “Okay, we’ve been fed,” Colleen said at my shoulder. “We have to get them out of here, you know where? Because we have to go right now.”

  “But I haven’t made ham salad!” Evadare hollered from the front. “And the tv said snow, you should wait.”

  I turned and took Colleen’s hands, rubbing their thin bones beneath my thumbs. She raised her eyebrows, unsure, and wrinkles went up into her hairline. When was the last time I’d shown my teeth to smile and not to bite somebody?

  “I found your Megan.”

  “Next stop, Lincoln, Nebraska,” I announced to the passengers, flinging open the back doors. The sky was sidewalk-gray and fat snowflakes flitted like moths. “If you’re backtracking to North Platte, Denver or points between, you’ll be switching to a new coach, and—”

  “It’ll be so fly!” Grace grinned with that gap in her teeth, her shoulder pressed against the sharps-disposal bin. “I call shotgun, hey—shotgun on the zombie shuttle!”

  “Hell, yes! Zombie Disneyland!” Clint worked his skinny denim arms like locomotive coupling rods. “I’m a-stockin’ the gift shop!”

  We’d parked under a big tall sign—just as Rob Aiken had described—shaped like a red coffee pot that read sapp bros. food & fuel and also greyhound.

  “We’re early,” I said, “so we ought to avail ourselves of the restaurant.”

  The kids started sliding out. Colleen was already striding across the parking lot on her pencil legs, leaning sideways against the wind—for all we knew Megan was waiting inside.

  “No, wait. One thing,” I said. “Everybody has to call home, right now. You can’t use your cell phones where we going. Franny’s got a phone, who else?”

  Am
ber and Grace held theirs up.

  “Like a hundred messages from my mom,” said Amber.

  “You don’t call her back?”

  “She’d freak.”

  “Jesus, trust me, until she hears your voice she assumes you’re dead, doesn’t eat or sleep, and Mom doesn’t deserve that, right? Tell them you’ll be away from school for a while, that I’m responsible for everything, even say that Mr. Vincent knows about it.” My neck went hot as they rolled their eyes at me. “Don’t tell them we’re in Lincoln but tell them you’re not dead, all right? I’ll borrow somebody’s when you’re done.”

  They nodded glumly. Harv sat on his hands on the gurney.

  “You don’t have to call home,” I told him.

  “My mom’s in Taiwan,” said Grace, with such a tight mouth I couldn’t see her missing tooth.

  “Leave a message. Account for yourself one way or another.”

  They sat on the jump seats, phones to their ears, except Amber, who walked around and sat in the driver’s seat. Colleen came out of the restaurant, showing me a quick shake of her head—no Megan yet.

  With white spray-paint someone had emblazoned Steph Eggers you rock me socks off onto the Greyhound bus at the curb, motor rumbling benevolently like Emperor Elephant in The Little Wretch. “Emblazoned” was such a great word; I wanted it emblazoned on my tombstone.

  Amber opened the door of the cab and slipped back down, wandering away to kick a hole through an aluminum trash can chained to a telephone pole. She swayed back toward us, mouth bunched like a fist, then fell onto Grace’s shoulder and sobbed like the rest of us weren’t even there, her one poor arm tight around Grace’s back.

  Harv crouched beneath the big revolving drum of the cement truck beside us. I stood beside him but he carried on squinting toward the far end of the parking lot.

  “Is that my dad down there?” he whispered. “You know my dad?”

  Between the big rigs and Camaros, an older-model motor home sat with its side door banging in the wind. A guy in a ball cap climbed the two steps and disappeared inside—only saw him from the back, but blond hair stuck out from under the cap.

  “He rides with state troopers,” Harv said through square teeth.

  Our mystery guy leaned out, shaking a yellow plastic tablecloth. He wore black-rimmed glasses, true, but he also sported a massive ZZ Top beard that nearly obscured his washington huskies sweatshirt. The wind flipped the beard up in his face as the tablecloth was torn out of his hands. He ran after it, toward the highway.

  “Holy, maybe I’m getting retarded,” said Harv. “What’s it say on the side there?”

  “Bigfoot.”

  “I can’t even read! See, when Dad was filming me yesterday, he gave me my brother’s old Maxims to look at, and you know what’s good about Maxim?”

  “The pictures,” I said into the wind.

  “Yeah, because I couldn’t even read what the girl’s name was, like not at all! I know what the letters are, no problem, but when they’re all pushed together?”

  “You were right.” Clint kneeled on the ambulance’s back bumper. “They are actually glad I’m alive. She says Jerry’s happy ’cause there’s no ligament damage.”

  “Waterproof mascara.” Amber finally raised her head, wiping an eye. “Thank God, hey?”

  Franny sat next to Clint, eyes red, and he put an arm around her. She held her phone out to me.

  I dialed and then leaned across the passenger seat up front, collecting our pop bottles and Styrofoam as though I was just killing time with the call and the focus of my entire being wasn’t really on a phone ringing on a kitchen counter inside Deb’s house in that hillside subdivision where everyone kept their dangly Christmas lights up all year—that I wasn’t actually willing myself to fly to MacArthur inside the telephone line’s carbon filaments just like the Atom in the old Justice League comic. And this was a cell phone, so even in a comic book it wouldn’t have worked.

  “Hey,” I practiced saying, “how are ya?”

  I stayed bent over the passenger seat, head out of the wind so that Josie and Ray would be able to hear me.

  “How are ya?” I said again.

  But it just rang and rang. Not even Deb’s answering machine. I stared at the numbers I’d dialed but they weren’t wrong.

  I backed out into the wind and found Colleen leaning over the hood, head down, her sleeves smeared with our trans-Nebraskan dust.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  She straightened up like I’d goosed her, then smoothed her lank hair back from her face as she held out a little red phone.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Drop this fucking thing in the trash,” she said through her teeth. “I called Doug to tell him where I was.”

  I reached for the phone but she spun and threw the thing—it sailed over a half-dozen rows of parked cars until it clanged against a milk truck. Then she strode across the parking lot, inspecting every vehicle, her arms folded tight against her. It wasn’t tracksuit weather.

  The wind unsnapped my cuff buttons as I trotted after her. Amber and Grace skipped over the parking lines, freshly eyeliner’d. It’d only been three hours since we’d finished that truckstop bacon but as I walked my legs felt hollow, knees and ankles crinkling like Dickside garbage bags—nitrite-poor anxiety suddenly fizzled at the corners of my brain, we had to eat!

  “Here, hey.” I slipped Franny’s phone into her hand. “Thanks.”

  “Aw, you!” she grinned, hair particulated with snow. “Thanks but no thanks!”

  She presented the phone again—someone’s finger sat pinched in the halves, its open end smeared purple.

  I looked at my right hand and saw that it was my finger.

  “Aw, goddamn.” I slipped the still-warm thing into my breast pocket—it smelled of cough syrup, sawdust. “Let’s get some of the good food in us, hey? Maybe run, okay? But nobody lose their head in here.”

  “Hey, G.” Franny stumbled over the toe of her sneaker. “You might be the first guy to mean that literally.”

  Clint giggled. “And I got your back, girl.”

  “I’d give an arm and a leg for some bacon,” said Grace.

  “Don’t lose your, um, footing,” muttered Franny

  “Keep a civil, um…tongue in your head,” said Harv.

  “I’ll knee you in the face,” I attempted. Good one!

  Inside, a sign above the cash register said hotbar buffet – $6.99. I was still good at reading signs. A woman in a black skirt walked up with a stack of menus.

  “Breakfast?” she asked. “Just yourselves?”

  “How can we get bacon?”

  “Oh,” she nodded. “Your party’s just around here.”

  We hustled after her between the tables. Old couples sat with teapots and putty-faced guys sat alone behind gently collapsing stacks of pancakes. What would Deb and the kids emblazon on my tombstone, anyway?

  —peter kingston giller—

  where did you fuck off to, man?

  and why in so many pieces?

  The waitress brought her red heels together beside a round corner booth, where Colleen already sat, eyes darting, behind a cup of coffee.

  “Here!” the waitress said. “And we’ll have more bacon out in just a minute!”

  Colleen kept gazing toward the door. “Where are Clint and the girls?” A rope of spit snapped between her teeth.

  “What you mean? They’re right—”

  “Over at the smorgasbord.” Harv pointed. “Got their plates and everything.”

  “You go ahead.” She waved a bracelet. “I’ll hold the table.”

  No sign of Rob Aiken strolling between the booths, so Harv and I powered our way toward the buffet like a pair of Ben Roethlisbergers. A chafing dish piled with grease-beaded bacon waited alongside hash browns
, pale scrambled eggs, beans and junk. Harv heaped eggs beside his bacon. My eyebrows might’ve gone up.

  “Trying to be polite,” he shrugged. “Did you talk to your kids?”

  “No answer.” I prodded through the bacon until I had forty-five strips that I really liked. “They must be out bowling.”

  “I just called home too,” he said.

  “What the hell—what for?”

  “Well, I thought maybe the finger-chopping thing had maybe been a joke.”

  “Jeez, man. Were they there?”

  “Dad picked up but when I said hi he passed the phone to Kim—that’s his girlfriend you met—and she said, for my own good, I shouldn’t come home anytime soon.” He clacked the bacon tongs like a pair of castanets. “I didn’t plan on going home right away anyway, I totally didn’t, so that was cool.”

  The others were circling from the drinks station back to the table.

  “Plenty of beans, Beanie Babies!” Franny called.

  Under those fluorescents the turtles on her skirt really glowed.

  “Try the white toast,” called Clint, bacon dangling like a cigarette. “Amazing.”

  “Gosh,” said a woman behind us. “Look at that snow come down!”

  “Mr. Giller.” Harv gave his plate a liberal puddle of ketchup. “Something else I’ve been wanting to say.”

  I nodded, the bacon between my molars saturating my tongue in joy.

  “It’s just that a guy can only control so much,” he said.

  “So…”

  “That’s all.”

  Weird. Deb had told me the same when Lydia had first gone into hospice, the exact words.

  “No, okay,” he said. “It’s just there’s been ten million times I’ve said, ‘Hey, Harv, man, this is out of your hands. Not your problem, not your fault.’ I appreciate what you’ve done for us, for me especially, and you should know we all appreciate it a lot. You took us to Velouria, right, but you couldn’t have known what’d happen to everybody.”

  “Jesus, of course I couldn’t—”

  “No,” he agreed.

  He lapsed into stoic chewing.

  The white squares of lattice around the table must’ve been hypnotic because I couldn’t remember eating any bacon though I was down to six pieces. The girls wiped their greasy fingers on Clint’s scarf and he just sat chewing, eyes rolled back in his head.