“Even your fish,” Matt said, flopping down onto one of the beds. “Keep ’em in this motel and they’re going to turn back into eggs.”

“No they’re not!”

“Sure they are,” Joe said. “And you’re going to be back in diapers by morning.”

Karen pitched in, declaring the three of them morons. “In the first place,” she said, “those goldfish were probably the only thing in our house that didn’t need to be evacuated. What are they going to do if the place floods, drown? They’re fish. In the second place, there was never any such thing as the fountain of youth. It was made up by hicks. And thirdly, even if there was, you’d have to drink from it to get younger, not just stay in some crappy motel named after the guy who discovered it.”

“They aren’t goldfish, they’re neon tetras,” Frankie corrected her, removing the foil top from the fishbowl and folding it into a triangle. “They’re Brazilian and they live for five years.”

“Maybe they’d like to live in the Ponce de Leon toilet,” Karen sneered—and then her mother descended on her like a hawk.

She grabbed Karen’s wrist, pulled her into the bathroom, and shut the door.

“You and I are going to talk,” she whispered fiercely. She looked even thinner than usual, her shoulders drooping out of a sleeveless light-blue T-shirt and her arms folded across her stomach.

Karen leaned against the wall between the toilet and the tub. “About what?”

“I think you know about what. Did you seriously think I wouldn’t find out about it?”

“Dunno, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her mother’s face was turning red. Her eyes were glassy with either anger or the beginnings of tears, and as much as Karen wanted to remain cool, it frightened her to look into them. “Yes you do.”

The overhead light went dark for a second, then came back on, brighter. This was about her father. He had been Karen’s secret weapon, a dagger strapped to her thigh; but now her mother had pieced something together, or suspected that Karen had, and it wasn’t fair because it was Karen’s weapon and it should have been her own decision when to brandish it.

But instead of saying anything about her father, her mother spat out, “Just what do you think you’re up to? I talked to Father Gillespie.”

Karen felt her stomach contract. “So what?”