“I don’t care. Who cares? What difference does it make?” I was crying now. “I hate you so much, Daddy. I killed someone. I killed him right here on this road. Stop the car. I want to get out and walk. Stop the car. I want to walk home.” I pulled on the door handle but he reached across me and grabbed it and pulled it shut and locked it and kept on driving. I grabbed his arm and bent my face down to bite him but he stopped the car and took my arms and held them to my sides. “You stop all this crazy acting, Sister. You killed that boy but now it’s done. I don’t want to hear any more about how fast you were going. I don’t want to hear any more out of you about anything until we get home. You just suck up your guts and get a hold of yourself.”

I laid my head back against the seat. My arms went limp and he let go of them. Usually I fought him longer and harder than this but today it didn’t seem to matter. He pulled back out onto the road and began to drive. I closed my eyes. I tried to remember standing by the storm cellar and Doctor Morgan talking to me. Atoms into molecules, molecules into bases, bases into amino acids, into something else. Remember that, he had said. Remember I told you that.

“We’ll get you down to Tuscaloosa where you can know some real people,” Daddy was saying. “Where we can keep an eye on you and you can know some folks that are our kind of people.”

Part Two

TUSCALOOSA

Chapter

7

So the con was on. He knew when to strike. Whether or not the accident had been my fault the guilt was mine and it was a vein anyone could mine for years. So of course Daddy was the first to get a pick and go to work on it. I felt guilty and I was vulnerable. For many nights I would wake up in the middle of the night with lights coming at me and the car turning and turning into the crash. Sometimes the impact would be on my side and I would be lying in the coffin. Sometimes alive in the grave. Sometimes the car would be coming toward me and I would turn the wheel to sacrifice Clay. Always in the dreams Doctor Morgan and Patricia and Mother and Daddy would line up to call me to judgment.