“How will Dad know where we are?” Harvey asked when they left Atlanta, and she told him not to worry, that she sent the address. What she didn’t say was that she sent it telepathically, because she really wasn’t sure where to send it. Brent had said he was moving to Alaska, but the last time he sent a check that got forwarded, it was postmarked Alabama.

Harvey asked did she think his dad would ever come back, and she said yes, yes, she did; she just didn’t say as what.

When Brent said he thought it was best if they went their separate ways, he said it was clear she wanted that, too, because she had done nothing to try and change his mind. In a trial, someone would argue that he had manipulated the truth to his own advantage. “Don’t you have anything to say?” he asked her.

“Don’t ever beg, Shelley,” her older brother once told her. He was in high school and worked at the bowling alley on the weekends, and smelled like cigarettes and floor wax and fried food when he draped his arm around her. “They’ll always disappoint you.”

They were on the small back porch, right off the kitchen, where their parents sat smoking over their empty plates; he whispered, finger up to his lips, then pulled several bills from his back pocket and counted out just enough for her to order something on paperback day at the middle school. People who ordered nothing looked weird or poor, and her brother understood this.

“Here,” he said. “Get something good.” And she did; she got a book called Dear Patti: Advice for Teenage Girls and a book of tongue twisters she practiced for months after—red leather, yellow leather and she sells seashells—things she sometimes teaches Harvey when he can’t sleep, or says to herself when hoping to conjure that image of her brother and better days, or to not think at all.

Frank

Before they were even old enough to worry about losing their memories, Lil had quizzed Frank about their special word. “Do you remember?” she would ask, leaning in close for him to whisper in her ear and prove it, like he was some kind of imbecile or hadn’t taken that long-ago conversation seriously.

“Of course I remember,” he told her. “I thought of it. Do you remember that?”

“Do you remember where we were?”

“Of course I do.”

By the time they had packed up their lives and started driving to North Carolina, she said only, “Do you,” and he said, “Yes.”

“How do you know what I’m going to say?” she asked.

“Because I know you.”