I expect him to finish but he goes silent. We’re passing into Barrens now. And even from here, from the other side of town, the smoke from Optimal’s chimneys is visible, like fingers splayed into a gesture, but I can’t say what it means.

“What happened to them?” I say finally.

He opens his eyes. “Big storm came through. Overnight the temperature dropped forty degrees. There was no warning, nothing on the reports. Just a change in the wind and a freeze knocked all the leaves from the trees and made it winter overnight.” He brings a hand to the window and presses it to the glass, then pulls away to watch his prints disappear. “They were all dead by morning, every one of them, six tiny kittens and the mother, too.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am, but puzzled, too: out here you get used to things dying. There are farms buzzing with flies, cows and pigs and chickens slaughtered to fill deep freezers. Deer hunted in the winter, cats killed in the road, and birds dropped from the sky.

“I don’t know if there’s a God,” he says. We’re still moving, punching through a great big hanging picture toward nothing. “I used to think it was a plan. And even the bad things that happened, your mom getting sick, a kid getting mowed over, it was all part of the plan. But what kind of plan is there for kittens to freeze like that? They meant nothing to nobody. What kind of God would do that. Why not leave them unborn in the first place?” For a second, anger tightens his face, and he looks like the man I remember. “There’s evil in this world, Abby. You remember that. You look for it. You look so it can’t look for you.”

The world exhales. This sounds like the father I know. Smoke unwinds against the clouds. “I’ll remember.”

He leans back in his seat, satisfied. As we pass the clutter of tire shops and fast food outlets and new restaurants, Optimal lurches out from the distance again, an ugly sprawl between the trees.

“Look at that,” he says. “All that smoke. Chemical spew. Disgusting.” He shakes his head. “They killed her, you know,” he goes on. “Oh, I know everyone says they didn’t. But they did. They killed her with all their filth. Poison and greed, that’s all it is.”

Mom died right before Optimal finished construction. The day we buried her, the first bit of smoke came up from the chimneys, and I remember thinking at first it was a kind of celebration.

“They didn’t kill her, Dad,” I say, though I’m not sure why it matters. “Mom got cancer before.”

“I’m not talking about your mother.” He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes again. “I’m talking about that girl, the one everyone always fussed about. Kaycee Mitchell.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Only when morning comes do I realize that it must have been night. I remember drinking. My dreams were full of bright-colored bodies. Shades of blue and orange and red. There was fire. It smelled like paint.