I hugged Grayson. Above the layers of flannel and thermal and fleece, his coat was stuffed with balls of newspaper. We had learned to do this miles ago, insulating ourselves like old house walls. When I hugged him, it crunched.

Beneath all of this was a person I had grown to trust, to even love a little. I tried to imagine the road without his dumb jokes and hesitant driving. I didn’t want to think yet if Starla would miss him. If she would ask where he was, the limping, bearded man who would sometimes carry her around on his shoulders, though it must have hurt his foot. He saved the softest lumps of meat for her. What could her life be like if she got to grow up with someone like him? I had stopped trying, years ago, to imagine a life where my daddy hadn’t left when I was little, or Mama hadn’t met Lobo—or Lobo was different. Just different. That was all I had dreamed.

There had been other men before him but I didn’t remember much. They were flannel and beards and beer, indistinguishable from each other. I was still not sure, after all these years, why Lobo had stuck. He yelled at the sky, at the eggs burning in the skillet, at a series of dogs who ran away. He didn’t plan on being a daddy, but he loved my mama and part of the way he showed that love was by putting up with me—Mama had told me that once. We always had food, though it was often deer meat, and potatoes and tomatoes he grew. We had warmth, though it was woodstove heat. There was money for school supplies and clothes and gas. Lobo provided. Was that why she had gotten stuck? Because he kept us from dying? I wanted something more.

We didn’t talk about keeping in touch, Grayson and I, because how could we possibly do that? How could we manage that now? Our phones were rocks. The internet was dead. The Church might not stay in this company town if invaders came, or tragedy came, or something better came along.

“Get that radio station working,” was all I could say.

He held my shoulder. “Get to California.”

Before turning in for the night, I double-checked everything in the tiny house: that the windows were locked, the stove off, that no one from The Church had stolen anything. I looked in the cupboards, counted our dwindling packages of deer meat. I should have felt grateful that I still had the keys to my house and truck, that I had been allowed to park close to where we were staying. I was telling myself that when I noticed them.

The beans by the windowsill. The seeds in the jars I had watered faithfully, for a long time, for nothing.

They were sprouting.