“Guess you’ll want to overnight,” Elaine says, into the silence.

“We can sleep in the RV.” Dad picks his own moments to exhibit manners.

“Don’t bother. I don’t mind. Got a couch and a spare room.” She looks at Dorothy. “I bet you’d like a real shower, wouldn’t you? Why don’t I make everyone coffee?”

They all sit together in the living room. Dad nods magnanimously when Elaine looks for permission to pour Dorothy a cup of coffee, and Dorothy sips at it while Dad tells Elaine about the Viper-King. He tells her about the myth, and the fortune-teller, and Their Lady Pinned on the Corkboard.

He talks like a roadside preacher who’s caught someone by the wrist and knows he only has a minute or so to get his spiel out; all quick ands, and anyways, and sos, and earnest you see, don’t yous.

Elaine goes into the kitchen again, while he’s rambling, and comes back with three peaches and a pack of cigarettes. She puts one of the peaches in front of each of them, and takes a lighter from the drawer of the coffee table. Dad doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t like people to smoke around Dorothy. Dorothy involves herself in watching Elaine light up, hoping he won’t say anything. Elaine’s fingers are callused and deft, her dry lips purpling.

She tips the pack in Dad’s direction, offering, and he stops, mid-sentence, mid-explanation, and says, “Why not? Haven’t done this in a while.”

Dorothy puts her coffee cup down on the table, for the sound it makes, the break in the moment when they’re both taking a breath and Dad is looking at Elaine while smoke pours out of her mouth, and then eats her peach. She wonders while she sucks the pit if it should surprise her more that the Viper-King is real. It’s really real, its skin is in the other room.

She cannot forget the moment when it occurred to her that Dad might be wrong. She was eight, cross-legged on the RV’s rough blue carpet, her hands in her lap. Dorothy spent a lot of days in RV parks clicking through channels. She’d landed on a television preacher, who was different than the ones she’d seen before, because he was combed neatly and his voice was soft. He was quoting Revelations in that soft voice. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.” He spoke like Dad. Dorothy has always read credibility foremost in the voice.

When Dad came in, he watched the television for a handful of minutes, swaying on his feet. “Come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another.”

Dad said, almost with affection, “Loon,” and then turned the TV off. He crossed from there to the corkboard, letting his hand fall just slightly above Our Lady of the Giant Snake.