It was dark when we stepped outside. We walked down the lit path to the gift shop. They sold Amish hats, Amish aprons, bonnets, corn dolls, honey, figurines, patchwork quilts, milk soaps, candles, books. I felt sick in the gift shop, the scent of the lotions and soaps overwhelming on an over-full stomach. I went outside to wait for the others, walking around to the side of the small clapboard house in case I threw up. Two girls around the same age as me were already there, smoking. They glanced at me the way other high school girls did, up and down. They wore Mennonite dresses and had white caps pinned to their hair. For some reason, it depressed me. I smoked, too, but I wanted them not to. I wanted them to be wholesome and pure and to fulfill my idea of them.

We drove home, Marie animated and happy next to my mother, Beatrice asleep already in the wayback, Ellen nodding off on Thomas’s shoulder. All of us were together, maybe for one last moment. Marie would leave tomorrow.

Driving through Lancaster in the dark, I remembered my eighth birthday. I had begged to go to the Longhorn Ranch, a Wild West–themed restaurant down on Route 1 based on Buffalo Bill Cody’s legendary place in Nebraska. I had asked for months for the three of us—me, my mom, and my dad—to go, even though Dad hadn’t lived with us for a long time. I remember driving into the parking lot, where, out front, there was a big-as-life plastic bull. The menu was huge and said everything was “Texas size.” When they brought out my birthday cake with a single sparkler, they turned off the lights. All the waitresses and waiters sang “Happy Birthday” around our table, dressed as cowhands with imitation Stetsons and six-shooter cap guns in holsters slung around their waists. They roared “Yee-haw!” at the end of the song, firing their cap guns in the air and then spinning them on their trigger fingers and putting them back in their holsters. I loved it.

Dad mostly stayed quiet. He said the whiskey menu was good, especially the prices, but the place itself was like a shrine to the worst part of American history.

“Look around you, Libby.” He gestured at the walls with his glass of whiskey. Indian headdresses and buffalo heads hung from hooks. “They obliterate the land and a people, and then display it as wall decorations.”

“Leave it, Martin. She just wants to enjoy this fiasco.”

Sitting in the back of the car that night, looking at the dark shape of my parents in the front, I felt bereft. There was something I understood. That the three of us, or all seven of us, together, happy, was as fake as the waitress with her Philly accent shooting her cap gun and shouting “Yee-haw!” Nothing was real.