She gave me one. I wanted to tell her how the one and only time Dad and I went someplace he fell asleep driving on the highway and I had to grab the wheel and guide the golden Saturn to the emergency breakdown lane. But why say anything about it? We survived.

I lit the smoke, and Mom said, “Well, did he?”

“I don’t know why you’re prying so much,” I said. “Since when do you care if he behaved himself?”

“A mother can’t be concerned?” she said.

I knew something was irking her—she never gave a shit what Dad did.

“Why are you annoyed? I said.

She coughed and cleared her throat. “Your sister,” she said. She lit a butted cigarette and the car swerved. I gripped the seat.

“What’d she do now?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

“What do you mean, ‘you’ll see’?”

“There’s something wrong with her.”

“There’s always something wrong with Paige.”

“No, I’m serious,” Mom said. “She’s gone wacko.” The car hit a pothole as we drove onto the bridge to the Island. “She believes in zombies, David.”

I wasn’t sure why, but I defended Paige: “Don’t you believe in stone people?”

“Those are different,” she said.

She wasn’t wrong: they were different. But I asked anyway. “How so?”

“Stone people have hearts of ice, and they were chased off for trying to destroy the earth. Zombies don’t run off too easily, do they? They come for you all slow like.” She flicked her cigarette.

“Well,” I said, “they sound different, but have you ever seen a zombie’s heart? For all we know it could be made of ice.”

She laughed smoke. “You’re a little shit.”

I stared out the car window. Weeds and cattails tangled in the pond. Dead sticks and large debris, blown from a storm, crawled out of the water, reaching at us as we puttered by and up the steep hill and past the few abandoned houses on the rez. At the top of the hill, Mom took the long way home. We drove on Wabanaki Lane toward the busy section of the rez: the small health clinic, the community building with its yellow-stained walls from cigarette smoke, the tribal offices tucked behind thick pine trees, the tan-brick school, and the football field, where red tents covered part of the green grass and the sacred fire burned in the corner. People tended the sacred fire, and a film crew stood next to its blue van, camera rolling, even though almost half of the tribe had voted not to let them make a documentary about our Community Days.

The road was blocked off and Mom slowed the car.

“For real?” she said. “All this for a stinking movie?”

She turned the car around, and I asked if Paige was home, yet she must not have heard me right because she started talking about Frick.