I drove. I had to move carefully. Silently, the roads were filling with white. The tiny house on its trailer slowed us as it swayed behind, creaking like an old ship. Getting out of the holler and onto the Appalachian Highway, long and smooth, would shoot us straight to the bridge to West Virginia. It was not far away, but it would mean hills, hairpin turns, narrow roads. This road, out of the Compounds, was barely paved, gorged with potholes.

Dance told me he had left a note, but he thought his daddy wasn’t coming back.

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Some of his things were gone. It’s hard to explain. Just a feeling, I guess.”

We passed a trailer with sheets of plastic shrouding the front porch. There was a mattress, partially blackened, in the yard. Maybe they had burned it to try to keep warm.

“I wouldn’t come back,” he said. “There’s nothing here.” He tensed his jaw.

Lobo did that, but I tried not to connect the two actions. They were different men: one was old; one was young, almost a stranger. There was safety in Dance being a near-stranger. He could turn out to be anyone. He could be just fine.

“My old man was embarrassed to not be able to support himself,” Dance said. “So he started drinking to cover it. Then he drank because he was embarrassed to be drunk. And then he was just drunk. He just became a drunk.”

I felt I should tell him: “Our folks both left. Mine and Grayson’s. Our people are gone, too.”

“But at least your mama wants you to follow her. Right?”

“I should have followed sooner.”

“But you’re following now.”

“I never should have let her go off with him. She doesn’t even have her own phone. At least when we were on the farm I could keep an eye on her.” I trailed off, checked the side mirror. There was my tiny house, a hulk behind us.

I didn’t know why I was talking so much. It was something about the road, the blank road rolling on. It made me want to go on. And on. The landscape stretched past us, bland. The trees should have been at their brightest at this time of year, exploding with orange and red. Instead, their bare branches rattled together. I never realized, before last year, how dull winter was. How much the same of everything.

“Is your mama around?” I asked Dance.

“No. We don’t talk about her. It just makes my old man sad. Or angry, depending on how drunk he is. She named me, though.”

“Do you remember her at all?” I thought of the memory I had of her: a woman taking Dance out of school, trailing the scent of pot.

He wouldn’t want to remember that, if he didn’t already.