“No. Somewhere warm. That was all they said, all they were allowed to say, I guess. I wasn’t a member, so... They didn’t tell me much. But The Church had been planning this, sort of. Planning a move.”

“How were they planning it?”

“Well, they were preppers. They were stockpiling things. Guns and stuff. But they weren’t prepping for this. They were prepping for, you know—the end of the world. Brimstone. That’s a little different, I guess. They weren’t prepping for winter. Just a long, shitty winter. Winter forever.”

I stared back through the windshield. The road was a monochrome rainbow of white: new snow, gritty packed snow, and a slick salted tongue of ice. It was slow-going. I thought of Lisbeth around a campfire. I thought of her sleeping in her shoes because The Church had taught her that the world might end at any moment, and she needed to be ready to run.

Grayson said The Church had prepared with guns, believing the world would end with fire. When they left for California, Mama and Lobo had taken the one taped under the dining room table.

But there was still a gun buried in the yard.

4

I expected Mama and Lobo to be there, even after a year on my own. Every time I turned off the rural route onto the dirt and gravel driveway—more and more, mostly gravel and ice—my shoulders tightened. I braced for the anger and silence, my mama moving quickly from one drudgery job to the next, her fingers flying. No time for anything, even for me. No time for thinking about what kind of life this was, what we had gotten ourselves mired in. She never stopped, except when she didn’t move at all, when she collapsed, chemicals trickling through her blood, eyelids slammed shut like diurnal poppies.

I still thought I’d see Lobo near the house, mute and focused, chopping wood, the ax above his head like a lightning rod. Mama taking laundry from the line strung from the porch to the peach tree, shaking the dried clothes because they had stiffened in the cold. Some part of me was stunned not to hear the ring of the ax.

I pulled up close to the farmhouse. I could see it through Grayson’s eyes: gloomy and bare. When things broke, we didn’t really fix them. We wedged cardboard where the broken glass had been; we stuffed rags in the drafts from the door.

“Well, this is it,” I said.

Grayson didn’t say anything. I showed him inside and nodded at the woodstove. “I’ll get the fire going. That helps a lot.”

I found myself apologizing. Some of the rooms had been shut off this year, to avoid heating them. I told him not to open any closed doors. I told him that included the basement.