“Right after you were born,” Dad says, sweaty palm on Dorothy’s quilt, when she is three, five, twelve, flat on her back and searching out patterns in the RV’s beaten metal ceiling, “I was in this bullshit cubicle job, going nowhere. But I had a little girl to take care of. And I couldn’t just clear out unless I wanted to starve her. And I didn’t ever wanna do that.

“My boss was the stupidest man I ever met, though. And what was I supposed to do except tell him, one day, ‘Mister, you are the stupidest man I ever met’? So there I was, then, walking home with my things, my plant and my picture of you, in my little fuck-off cardboard box, and I see this house with this sign in the window.”

And Dorothy asks, “What did it look like?” on cue.

Dad smiles at her. “Hand-painted, just like Our Lady.” The tarot card, Our Lady: of the house, the hunt, and hope. “Blue and white and gold. Looked just like a fortune-teller’s sign oughta look and it said ‘Lives Told.’ ”

“And what’d you get told?”

“Wait just a minute, kiddo,” he says, even though she’s supposed to ask. He’ll let the pause just hang there if she doesn’t. “I’m getting there. So I walk in, Dot, and I see this beautiful girl. Hair long as Our Lady’s and eyes as dark as anything. And she looks right at me, then she tells everyone else to get out of the room.”

It’s always been hard for Dorothy to imagine this part. The woman, ethereal and strange, with her sudden arrow focus on Dorothy’s father, who is stringy-muscled and untidy, who looks perpetually uncertain and just on the right edge of mean. More and more lately Dorothy’s been thinking, Like a dog. Like a hungry stray.

But the rest of the story pivots on this moment of prophetic recognition. And so it must have happened. Dorothy’s father says it did.

“She tells me to sit down. I’m still thinking this must be some kind of scam. But she tells me to sit down, and she takes my hand and she says, ‘It’s you.’ Then she hands me the deck like it hardly matters at all, like she knows what card I’m going to pull. And, of course, it’s Our Lady. Our Lady. Do you know what she said then, Dot?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘You’re going to find the King.’ ”

“King of what, Dad?”

“Well, that’s just what I asked. And she said, ‘King of the Vipers, mister. You’ll find the King of the Vipers, who is older than the land we stand on and has lived a dozen lives. When you find him, you must simmer the fat from his body and eat it, and then you will know everything.”

Who else’s life’s purpose, Dad likes to say, reaches out to take them by the hand?

Their corkboard is plastered with false starts: tabloid clippings from Maine to Mexico, printed blog posts, the photograph of the escaped pet python in Florida and the snake trails Dad and Dorothy drove all the way to Utah to see that, in person, were obviously just from a real big rattler. “Larger than that,” Dad told the farmer’s wife, whom he’d refrained from calling a dumb bitch until they were driving away. “Bigger than you, lady. Bigger than me.”