“It’s okay, Harvey,” Shelley says when there’s talk of seeing ghosts or when he comes to her in the middle of the night to say his bed is wet, always in a way as if he is surprised and has no idea how it got that way. Or when he asks the hard questions about where his dad might be. Alaska in an igloo? On a desert island? Inside a whale? The whale had caught her off guard, wondering where Harvey had learned about Jonah, since that is another ball she’d dropped in the lives of her children—no religion—or so Brent thinks, or thought, past tense; he is in past tense. But, no, not Jonah. Pinocchio. That’s where it came from, Geppetto inside of the whale. The church of Disney has been a much easier church for her to attend all these years. Sure, Walt had a dark side, but doesn’t everybody? Like certainly a God who smites this and that when he gets pissed off has a dark edge about him, right? Brent had been raised by people who believed that.

“Backwards,” she once muttered when he quoted something his mother had said, and he pulled off the road to set her straight. That’s what he said: “Let’s set you straight.” And then he said: “Who do you think you are anyway? Look at where you came from.”

Oh God, did she have to?

Every time she vacuumed that house Brent had rented in Georgia and emptied the bag, there were some old, putrid things to discover: hair and fingernails (whose?) and God knows what. It reminded her of her childhood. As soon as she’d moved in, she had wanted to rip out and burn the carpet, take up the linoleum yellowed with age and depression, the very molecules screaming of sadness and abuse, and Brent had promised in the beginning that she could fix things up, take down the heavy old waxy drapes and let in light and air. But it had never happened, and now she’s on her own in another old house, vacuuming somebody else’s putrid remainders, like maybe that old guy and his people who died here, and why does he want to get in so bad anyway? It’s creepy. She would never go back to where she came from.