We brushed the snow off the truck with our gloves and a straw broom, and we put away the boughs we had used for hiding, kicked snow into our cooking fire. Jamey took the first turn at the wheel. I was grateful that we had been teaching her to drive before Dance and Grayson left; I wouldn’t have had the patience to do it myself. She bumped down the fairground path and lurched onto the main road without looking. I glanced in the back seat, but Starla, full of milk, slept on.

“I did some looking but I didn’t find any food at the fairgrounds,” Jamey said. “Other than that old pepper.”

“I wouldn’t think that you would.”

“But I did find...” She turned from the wheel to look at me, her eyes flashing like a gremlin, and I had to restrain myself from redirecting her attention to the road. “A bag of powdered sugar! I broke into the funnel cake shack, and there was a big bag of powdered sugar just sitting there.”

“You broke into the—”

“Unopened. Nobody had touched it. No bugs or anything.”

“The bugs are all dead, Jamey. And that’s all Starla needs, a big bag of sugar.”

“You say that now. But one of these cold nights, you gonna be glad I took it.”

“Did you at least pay for it?”

“Money doesn’t matter anymore.”

I wondered if that was true.

“French fries,” Jamey said, thinking aloud. She slapped the wheel. “I wish I had found some of those. I loved funnel cake, but I really loved French fries, didn’t you? The best part of the fair. Second best, after derby night. A big cup of thin, greasy fair fries. Eat ’em as you walked around.”

I remembered. It seemed like a funny thing to have to remember: cheap junk food that you could have found anywhere once. “You had to eat fast because the vinegar made them all soggy.”

“Gross. No vinegar. Just salt and ketchup, baby.”

Jamey talked about cotton candy and caramel corn and cigarettes. More and more of the gas stations we stopped at had been ransacked. Not just abandoned, but trashed: windows broken, locks jimmied long before us. We stepped around glass shards to enter, empty chip bags scattered about the floor. We dealt with smashed bottles and sour smells, the smell of unplugged coolers, of things left to rot. Sometimes the gas pumps would be destroyed, consoles shattered or hoses ripped off, not that that did any good, not that it would bring fuel out of the ground. It made me nervous to go inside these places, after the man at the Taco Bell, but we had to try. We had no other choice.