“Look at that, Dot,” Dad says. He takes Dorothy’s hand and guides her finger to the screen, like the plastic is magic, and if Dorothy smears her fingerprints over the photo some of its realness will rub onto her hands.

Fate’s emissary calls herself Elaine, from Kansas. It is her arm giving the skin scale. Her email is blunt. Dad calls it “no-bullshit.”

“Found this in my cornfield. Thought with your website you might like to see it.” And then her address, on a line by itself, like a baited hook.

Dad’s “website” is just a blog on a free hosting service, which he updates periodically for an audience of, so far as Dorothy can tell, mostly no one. Dad’s email address is posted there, though, and every so often someone will use it. Dorothy’s already had to explain Photoshop to him once, following a mishap in Georgia that ended with him threatening a gangly teenager with his gun. When they were back in the trailer, Dorothy sat him down in front of the laptop. “See,” she said, “he just cut a picture of the barn, and he made it smaller than the rattlesnake. It isn’t hard.” Dad dug his nails into his hands until he bled. He couldn’t understand it, he just couldn’t understand it, why any person would lie like that, for sport and nothing else.

Dorothy wanders off while he’s printing. It’s too hot outside, but that’s all right. Kansas’ll be even hotter.

Dad’s another ten minutes. He comes through the door clutching the already creased photograph to his chest like he’s got the most infinitely precious thing in the whole world. When he grins, Dad shows the two missing teeth at the back of his mouth. It’s taught Dorothy to be wary of smiling. She takes the picture from him, watches her sweat smear over the ghost of Dad’s quest. “It looks pretty real,” she says, “I guess.”

Dad laughs with his head tipped back. He looks like he’s howling. “I guess it does, Dotty Dot. I guess it does.”

Dorothy watches an ant carry a dead ant over a crack in the sidewalk. “Yeah,” she says. What else is she supposed to say?

* * *

Dad announces, “Ten hours to Kansas,” when they’re back in the RV, and Dorothy watches him cross to the corkboard and carefully fasten the photograph there, under the gaze of their Lady. He’s beaming like a revival preacher on Judgment Day. “Wanna come up front with me?”

Dorothy shakes her head. “I gotta do math.”

All Dorothy’s homework comes from the homeschooling site that’s the first result on Google, except her math, which is from one of those programs for gifted kids. Dad went to a lot of trouble to get her into that class, after Dorothy started complaining of how bored she was with the online curriculum she’d been following since she was eight, which itself came about when Dad decided she needed something more than what he was teaching her. Dorothy does her best to be grateful. She’s always had a touch for math, what one of her new lessons calls “number sense,” and what Dorothy thinks of as having a good idea of the shape of things. That’s really all it is, knowing how stuff comes together, knowing where the hard edges are.