Weed needs a warm, humid climate. Always before, that was what we had in southeastern Ohio; that was our gift. One of the only things that grew well in our old, abused soil, the earth mistreated by years of coal mining and fracking and mountaintop removal, was marijuana. That was what Lobo said.

But the outdoor harvest the year that Lobo and Mama decided to leave had been a bad one. A wet spring, if you could call it spring at all. Lobo and Mama had lost their plants that they grew in the wild: in neglected lots, in deep forest, in patches of unused land behind highways, in woody acres belonging to the state or accessible only by canoe.

Some of the plants that Lobo had hiked in on a pack and planted at twilight in the illegal ground had been swept away by rain. Other plants never took. The earth was too wet and chilled. Their roots rotted. Still other plants froze: their leaves folding, blackening, then falling off. Or they were eaten young by desperate animals or the always-desperate insects. Every time Lobo went out in a canoe to check on the wild plants, he returned with his head a little lower, his back more dejected, his jaw tight. I knew he would chew his food silently and angrily, lash out at Mama, kick something down the stairs. I didn’t go up to the farmhouse for dinner on those nights. I didn’t want to be the thing he kicked.

Outdoor crops were half our income. But after the first cold year, after the loss of everything wild, we didn’t even try to plant outside. All we had left was the grow room in the basement of the big house.

As a teenager, I had avoided going in there. It hurt my eyes. I felt it would stick on me, like the scent of weed, be obvious. I thought—like sex—once I had been down in the grow room, people would know. And they did know, but for other reasons: it was a small town. There were rumors that were true; people bought from Lobo and knew his girlfriend had a daughter. Our weed was good. People came across state lines to buy it. And they talked about it, about us.

Lisbeth and I became fast friends because I was an outcast and she was a Church weirdo. She had a list of forbidden things, and she obeyed it, at first. She would talk to me without asking, like other kids did, Do you have any on you? Is it true, what they say, that yours is as sweet as strawberry?