And then Horace had to show up and ruin it.

I remember being home alone one day when I was fifteen, just sitting on the front porch, reading Hart Crane, when this hotshot police cruiser pulled up. I was thinking, Aw, crap, what has Murphy done now? But who should step out of the passenger seat but my own mother, wearing a fucking sundress, while this big lumbering hulk of a sheriff got out and walked around the car like he was going to walk Mom to her door. What’s more, Mom was laughing like this guy was the funniest person she’d ever met in her whole life.

I couldn’t believe it.

As a family, we had always been distrustful of cops. And not just because Murphy was always getting picked up for one reason or another: trespassing, petty vandalism, driving without a license, that sort of thing. I was used to Murphy coming home in a cop car and Mom having to promise and flirt her way out of trouble. I wasn’t used to Mom flashing a genuine smile at a gargantuan bear of a man in uniform.

She waved goodbye to him and made her way up the cobblestones to the porch. The sheriff leaned against his car and watched her, clearly pleased with what he was seeing. I glared at him as if to say, I see you, motherfucker. He caught me looking, I made sure of that. But you know what this sheriff—what Horace, my future stepfather—did? He gave me my stare right back, and he gave it harder, and he gave it more furious than I ever could. I remember our eyes locking and feeling a sense of fear way back in my spine. I remember a chill falling over me that blazing hot day. I remember somewhere deep in my mind thinking, This man is trouble.

This man could be the ruin of us all.

I don’t know why. It was just a feeling. But when Mom made it to the porch and the sheriff drove away with a wave, I braved up and asked her.

“What the hell was that, Mom?” I said.

“Oh, you know,” said Mom, smiling all mysterious-like.

“No, I don’t know. When did you start messing around with cops?”

“He’s not just a cop,” she said. “He’s a sheriff.” And Mom sauntered into the house, singing to herself.

I didn’t like it. Not one fucking bit.

And now we were here—Mom was dead, and Murphy and I were on the run, hiding out at our weird grandmother’s house.

Life was pretty horrible like that.

The ceiling fan above me spun lazy and slow, and eventually I managed to fall asleep somehow.

I had only one recurring vision, and that was of the Hobo, the man who always peeked into my window at night. I’d been seeing him since I was maybe seven years old. I named him the Hobo after I found this book in the library, The Hobo Code. It was all about the history of transient workers during the Depression, riding trains, eating scraps, searching desperately for work. He looked just like one of the men in the pictures—gaunt, ragged, with that haunted look in his eyes. I knew that real hobos had a language, a system of symbols they scrawled on the doorposts of buildings to say whether places were hospitable or cruel, whether the owners treated you well or cheated you. I looked everywhere for a code from the Hobo, for some kind of symbol telling me what he was or what he meant. But he never did anything except watch me. It wasn’t just at the window that I saw him, but that was usually the place he liked best. He was always on the outside, some distance away from me, like there was something barring him from me, some invisible barrier between us.