“Southern America. It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery. Settled by Scandinavians. So, either Larry is a migrant from the South—”

“Which he just said he isn’t  . . .”

“Or he, or his dad, adopted—affected—Southern stylings. Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’ . . .”

“Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian, getting into the spirit of things. He extended an arm forth between the front seats and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin’s truck. It was balanced, on the other side of the license plate, by a “Remember Moab” sticker.

“I don’t know, man,” said Phil. “I see that shit all over the place. Always have. It’s a constant.”

“To you,” Sophia agreed. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle, who lived from the mid-1950s to about seventeen years ago. He saw the change during his lifetime. When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—”

“The cultural border shifted north,” Anne-Solenne said.

The border, of course, was not a line on a map; it couldn’t be, because it did not legally exist, had no official reality. It was a blended zone that straddled that belt of the outer suburbs where Walmarts tended to exist. As they moved outward from the city, vehicles containing nonwhite people found reasons to pull off the street into the parking lots of businesses, parks, schools, or churches. Nothing ever impeded the flow of traffic outward. Vehicles coming the other way, inbound from the country, were rarely if ever stopped Checkpoint Charlie–style. But they were sure as hell scrutinized. Nothing came in from that direction without being seen and scanned by a hundred cameras. Vehicles that were hard to see into, because of darkly tinted glass or no glass at all, tended to get pulled over by peace officers who expressed polite curiosity about how many people were in the back and what they were carrying. It was all so understated that an inattentive observer might not have noticed it. Had Uncle Dodge been somehow resurrected and joined them on this drive, he might have seen very little overt change from how it had looked in his day. But, gray and blurred as it might have been, the border, staked out by Walmarts and truck stops, was as real as anything from Cold War Berlin.