Crazy had a name and it started with J.

For a while all the three of them could do during the car ride back home was laugh. They were laughing so hard that Lynn had to slow down on the back road because her eyes were tearing up so bad.

“Now you know,” Lynn said when she finally composed herself.

“Know what?” Sara asked.

“Why we didn’t move in with your uncle Jesse.”

“What do you mean?” Thomas asked in full-fledged sarcasm. “It’d be awesome living there.”

“Yeah, if you wanted to get shot.”

She couldn’t help that last remark. It made them all laugh again.

“Why would someone come steal the glass in that car?” Sara asked.

“People will steal anything,” Lynn said. “It’s just—I doubt they’d ever come on his property looking for something to steal.”

“I saw a pair of tires,” Thomas said. “They looked new. Maybe we should sneak over there and steal them. We could use them.”

“It’s a mayater of preencepal,” Lynn said, trying to capture her brother’s accent.

“Why don’t you talk that way?” Thomas asked.

“Because I try. Or maybe because your father rescued me from living here.”

“How did Dad rescue you?” Sara asked from the backseat.

Lynn let out a sigh and knew that the laughter had been great medicine for recent days.

“Your father’s family—now, they were poor. Didn’t have anything. I never saw his pop smile. Never saw him sober either. When we started dating, your father promised me we were going to get away and see the real world.”

“So where’d you guys go?”

“Georgia.” Lynn couldn’t help smiling. “Atlanta was the real world, at least to your father. Anywhere outside of Greer, South Carolina, was the real world. He didn’t want to end up like his father. Or like my family.”

“So what happened?” Thomas asked her.

“Thomas . . .” It wasn’t the question itself that Lynn didn’t like, but the way Thomas had said it.

He just stared at her in the passenger seat, waiting for a response.

“Your father was different. He was different than all of them.”

For a moment she stared at the headlights cutting through the dark wilderness. No streetlights illuminated their drive back home. This was the country. The dark, lonely country, the kind she had once escaped.

But the darkness found us. It followed us and found us.

“Your father was a lot like you when I first met him,” Lynn said.

“How?”

“Just—in a lot of ways, actually.”

“Then . . .”

“What happened?” she finished for him. “I don’t know. Sometimes we can’t escape our roots. Sometimes you can get away but you still can’t change who you are at the core.”

“That mean I’m going to end up like Dad? Or Uncle Jesse?”

“No,” she said quickly. “It means that moving doesn’t always solve your problems.”

Even in the darkness of the car, she could see her son glance at her with a look that said, No duh, Mom.