Her mother blew air out of her nose; glancing to the right, she honked at a car and sped around it. “We need everything, Summer! A place to live. I need a job, support, God...not in that order.” Her mother’s braid hung between her shoulder blades, thick and shiny, as she leaned forward to change the radio station. She bypassed a couple songs Summer liked, only to stop on a station that was playing the blues. Summer rolled her eyes, falling back against the seat. The change in music seemed to make her mother happy; she rolled the window down all the way and sang out at the desert. Her nails were painted a deep red, chipped at the tips. Normally, she never let her nails look like that, but things had been weird lately. Her mother was always tired, always working, always crying. Not in that order.

“Who is your friend?”

This time her mother met her eyes in the rearview mirror. She turned down the radio and pulled a piece of hair out of her mouth before answering.

“We were friends when we were kids. I haven’t seen him in a long time, but we kept in touch. Kind of, anyway...and when your dad died, he reached out to see if there was anything he could do.”

“Like what? Bring him back from the dead?”

There were a couple minutes of prickly silence as her mother stared her down in the rearview mirror. Summer, who was sitting in the back seat as protest for this whole ridiculous trip, looked out the window.

“Hey! Promise me you aren’t going to run your mouth like that when we get there. The last thing I need is—”

“I’m not trying, Mama!” And it was true: the first thing that came to her mind always seemed to shoot out of her mouth like shrapnel.

“You sound like your father.” Her mother’s voice was wounded, but Summer felt stung, too. You sound like your father were mean words from Lorraine, who’d spent the whole of Summer’s life complaining about the man. She didn’t want to talk about her dad, anyway. When she thought about him her chest hurt with how empty it was. The word dead, which had held little meaning to her before, could now trigger a frenzy of bad electricity in her chest.

She knew enough about how people worked to formulate her next question. “What does he need from us?”

“Nothing.” Her mother rested an arm across the bench seat, steering with her left hand. There had been nothing but flat red dirt for hours. “Some people just care, they want to help.”

Where were these people when her dad needed help? But she didn’t say that—couldn’t say it—or she’d get in trouble.

Lorraine caught her daughter’s eye via the rearview mirror again, two brown orbs of intensity.