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Dedication

For Robyn O’Neil

Epigraph

THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE

BECOME GHOSTS INSIDE

OF YOU AND LIKE THIS

YOU KEEP THEM ALIVE

—Robert Montgomery, People You Love, 2010

1.

The hills around the freeway were a dusty yellow, showing wear from months of drought. Winter rain hadn’t settled in yet, and the last few years had been absent any significant storms.

I was not good at having confrontations, so I was fleeing again.

After you’ve driven through Mojave, California, there isn’t much left in the way of towns as you head north. An airplane graveyard sparks up from the dry brush a few miles out, where pickup trucks with DON’T TREAD ON ME stickers drive fast on narrow roads. The kind of roads that lead into vast desert nothingness, punctuated only by rusted, spray-painted freight trains that roll slowly toward one border or another.

Outside Mojave, red rocks spring up before giving back over to flat, dusty land dotted with wind-worn white crosses jutting out at different mile markers by the road, signifying people who didn’t make it home.

This emptiness, of places long past their boom—mining towns and turn-of-the-century company towns—felt comfortable to me. I looked for burned-out ghost towns next to long-shuttered convenience stores, because I liked to think about the limitations of what someone’s imagination could build out here.

I stopped at one such relic on my drive, enticed by a sign that looked newer than anything else alongside the road, announcing FROG BALLS FOR SALE. The store’s glass doors were grimy and locked, the shelves dusty and half filled with faded boxes of Hamburger Helper and milky-hazed jars of what I could only assume were floating frog balls. This ghost town was not all that different from other roadside stops I had made before—it was just missing a burned-out Cadillac out front. Here, freestanding motel bungalows with broken-down doors lined the two-lane road, evidence of a simpler time. One such bungalow had been converted into a bar with a rotting piano inside, with bottles strewn across tables and yellowed American flags serving as both window dressing and curtains to diffuse the light. It was the kind of place that looked like bad things happened there—both when it was up and running, and now.

“Evelyn was not a mistake.”