“Was the car okay?”

“No, we had to abandon it and fly home.” He sighed. “We never made it all the way.”

“That’s too bad,” I teased. “How are you going to write your Kerouac-inspired memoir now?”

“Well,” he paused, intertwining his fingers and pressing them into the back of his head, “maybe you could help me with that. I thought you were the writer.”

I titled my head and glanced down, embarrassed for some reason. “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, anyway.”

He grinned. I liked the way his front teeth overlapped, his confidence in movement and articulation. The way he smelled: sweet, like almonds, with a hint of spruce.

“How old are you?” he asked, grabbing a bottle of whiskey from the coffee table.

“Seventeen. How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

I nodded. “Cool.”

“Let’s do a shot, kid,” he said, pouring the booze into two glasses. A red-haired girl stumbled and nearly fell over, cackling as she caught herself against the bookcase.

Jack handed me a glass and I tossed the whiskey down, turning away from him, trying not to gag. “Smooth,” I said as I retched.

He chuckled, squinting his bloodshot eyes. “You good?”

“Oh yeah, I’m fine.” I laid my shot glass on the Bible my mother used for doodling.

“Hey, don’t be so sacrilegious.” He nudged me playfully on the shoulder.

“You believe in that stuff?”

“Fuck no. I know God doesn’t exist,” he declared, his speech slightly slurring. “Science hasn’t been able to prove it.”

“So you think science is the new religion?” I raised an eyebrow, smirking. “How original.”

He allowed his head to fall slightly, shooting me a look. “You’re funny. Your mom said you were smart, but what mother doesn’t think that about her kid?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shifted, pulling a package of flattened cigarettes from his back pocket, offering it in my direction. “I just wasn’t expecting to like you so much, that’s all.”

At four o’clock in the morning, after everyone had gone home, I went looking for my mother. I found her outside on the balcony in the still night. She was staring intently into the dark woods, smoking a cigarette.

I walked up behind her, standing silently for a few moments gazing up at the sky. The moon was yellow, cratered with grey, nearly full. A few days away from completing its cycle.

“I’m going to marry him,” I told her.

Chapter 6

I was raised by artists in an isolated town by the ocean, where garbage collection was just a man riding on the back of a pickup truck and the police looked the other way when the trailer park king sold individual cans of beer to minors on the weekends.

Our house was more than a hundred years old. Secured to a dory by rope, it had been floated across the water from another, smaller community. I was told the water rippled as the boat glided through, pulling the house, its furniture and photographs shifting from side to side as it sailed along. Once settled onshore, it was balanced on a row of logs and hauled by horses to its resting place.