There was never any unspoiled milk, and fewer and fewer cigarettes. Not the brand Jamey wanted. “People steal the good stuff,” she said. We would pass the cash register with its drawer hanging open, empty as a mouth, but I still left a little money, folded on the counter, to pay for the things we took, though Jamey said I was being dumb.

We saw our first dead body at a rest stop.

We had parked the truck and gotten out while Starla napped in the back, just leaving the baby for a moment in order to see if the vending machines right by the parking lot were full.

But they had been looted, of course, smashed and emptied. Jamey was picking up a few snack bags dumped on the ground and shaking them when I saw the shoe sticking out of the snowbank.

I left the little vending machine alcove to look closer. The shoe was attached to a foot, a leg, unmoving as something unnatural—or the most natural thing of all. The dead body looked like a branch, a rock, part of the wild like it had always been there. A bone going home, back to ground.

“Don’t look,” I said to Jamey.

But she was already at my elbow. “Is he—?”

“Yes. There’s no point even in checking.”

We thought the semi truck parked to the side of the rest stop, the only other vehicle we could see, must have been the man’s. The dead man’s. We couldn’t get into the back, the lock was jammed—probably it was trashed back there, anyway, Jamey said—but she managed to break into the cab. She scavenged a thick pair of mittens, some instant coffee. A crate of oranges sat on the front passenger seat. The oranges were all greenish-white and solid, but we took them into the tiny house kitchen, anyway, in case they were only frozen and not rotten. I was thinking of what the man at the flea market had said about scurvy.

Then Jamey took the empty, wooden orange crate and shoved a blanket down inside it. “For Starla. She’s supposed to have a car seat,” she explained to me, as if I wouldn’t have known.

We looked down at the little seat she had made. It was a good idea. There was a faded illustration on the side of the crate: leafy trees, plump glistening oranges.

“If we don’t get to California, that would be okay,” Jamey said. “I mean, if something happens, it would be okay to stop somewhere for the rest of the winter. Try again for California in the spring, maybe.”

I think we both knew there wasn’t going to be a spring. I think we both knew that if we stopped, we were going to stay.

“The first good place?” I asked.

“The first good place,” Jamey said.

We fought after I took over driving.