But though the man had backpacks and canteens for sale, though there were duffel bags and utensil sets, I didn’t see any boxes of ammo.

The man—I thought I remembered his name was Phil—nodded at me from a folding chair. “Wylodine,” he said. “Good to see you looking well.”

“You got any ammo?” I asked.

A slow shake of his head.

I was surprised to feel relief. Maybe I should have it, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to have to figure out what the gun took, how to load it. How to use it.

“Try the Walmart,” Phil said.

“I don’t want to go back there. What about MREs?”

“Sold out of those weeks ago. Your best bets are canned goods and dried food at this point. Do you have vitamin C?”

I thought back to the clinic pharmacy. “Why?”

“To prevent rickets, child. Scurvy, if we don’t have any oranges this year. Don’t you read the internet?”

“We don’t have internet at the farm.”

“Oh.” Phil was sucking on a toothpick. “How’s your mama?”

My hand stopped on a canteen. The leather casing felt like a living hide under my fingers, bunched with wrinkles, dry rivers of skin. I thought of the calf skeleton again. “Great,” I said. “She and Lobo are doing real good.”

I drifted away past Phil’s stand, and though he may have called something to my back, I ignored it. We were fine; I was fine. I was certainly not out there alone on the farm. I was certainly not thinking of leaving it all behind, leaving the farm unprotected, driving away and locking the gate forever.

I was sure Phil was one of Lobo’s customers, or had been. Maybe one of the men who came up to the farmhouse to visit with him and Mama after I was shut up in my place for the night. Was Phil one of the men who had angered him somehow, asked for too much, paid too little, tried to touch something that wasn’t his?

Lobo called these customers problems. He solved problems with his fists. Sometimes that’s the way you’ve got to do it, he said. People need a lesson they can see on their skin.

The smoke on those evenings was so thick it drifted down like mountain fog to my door. I swore I could taste it in my sleep. I was surprised the drug dogs didn’t come after us those nights, alerted to the scent as they stuck their heads out of windows, riding in the staties’ cars down the road.

Frost whitened the pavement. I glanced behind me and could see, at the other end of the parking lot, the overhang of the gas station. The line for propane slunk around the wall. I checked my phone. Grayson would still be waiting.