I helped him load up. He didn’t want to take much: clothes, books, a backpack with a beat-up laptop. “I should tell you,” I said when I saw the laptop. “We don’t have internet out at the farm. My mama and her boyfriend—they’re old-fashioned. And paranoid. They like the wilderness. Peace and quiet. Being remote. Plus, they didn’t want to pay for it.”

“Do you have cable?”

“No.”

I knew how it sounded. In a town that included The Church, this absence marked my family as the strangest of all. Mostly, even the dirtiest double-wide, the smallest shack, windows streaked with soot from the last cooker blowout, had a flat-screen: giant and blaring. Appalachian halos, Lobo used to call the blue glow that came from all the households watching TV at night. It must have made him feel good—superior—to have resisted this one pull, this single wicked thing.

“It’s nice,” I said. “You notice things in nature. But we’ve kind of been sheltered.” I thought of one of Lisbeth’s old neighbors, near the bar. They had broken windows, no time or money or inclination to fix them, but they also had a hummingbird feeder on a hook, which they always kept full of red sugar. “You get used to it.”

“Wait a minute.” Grayson hobbled back into the house. Soon he came back, one last box in his arms. Wires poked out.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A ham radio. It was a project for Boy Scouts.”

“You were a Boy Scout?”

“Not a very good one.”

We drove away from the house. Grayson looked back only once. I felt a strange sort of sadness as he did. It was years ago, when I had lived there, before Lobo, before growing. I had collected cereal box tops for school; watched TV at night with my mama, wrapped in an afghan against her shoulder, listening to the neighbors’ fights through the walls. My own folks’ fights were over. My folks were over, stale as smoke.

But everyone fought in those hills.

We passed a decommissioned school bus on the side of the road. It had been spray-painted white, almost indistinguishable from the landscape, except for its blinkers flashing red. Someone knelt in the runoff next to the bus and fixed a flat tire. Inside, the bus was packed to the roof with blankets and boxes. They must have been running, fleeing somewhere. An orange cat stared at us out the back window, perched on an upside-down basket.

We had almost reached the farm before I spoke again. “Do you know where they went?” I asked Grayson.

He turned away from the window, looking at me.

“The Church. Your folks. Did they tell you where they were going?”