I felt, in that cold morning in the car, that I was an hourglass that had just been flipped, and all my sands were just starting to shift downward to that strangle point. I was astonished at the functional beauty of pavement, the cars. The candy-colored signs on tall poles by the roadside. The serious people heading in all directions. Each had their own task and their own destination.

Isaac bought me a small crackling bag of gas-station chocolates. I sat in the throne of the ’92 Taurus. I felt like an ancient person transported to the modern world, eating chocolate for the first time. The little chocolate kisses, off-brand, were grainy with sugar. I couldn’t stop myself from sighing.

“You like that?” Isaac said.

At the gas station, a woman stood up and took from the backseat of her car a baby. I noticed the folds of skin at the back of its neck, its antigravity hair, how bendy it was in her arms, its joints not fully formed. A loitering man threw cubes of ice onto the concrete, and they skittered and clacked and came to a stop right by the woman’s red shoes. Was he waiting for Bay, like I had?

“Oh, Beryl, what did you do?” Isaac said, and wiped my coal-black tears with his thumb. He said I smelled like burning oil. That was the burned-up flesh, heavy, filthy, unwashable.

Isaac chucked the star-print chocolate bag out of the window. I whipped my head around to watch it flutter in the flow of cars. With the Ash Family, a broken jar had meant punishment and shame. A broken jar had been devastation. Out here the stakes were too low.

The wind vortex in the Taurus flopped Isaac’s hair in all directions. White flowers sprouted on the highway banks but in a second we had passed them. One hawk for every half mile of piney highway. Shadows whispered through the car.

There were far too many things to pay attention to.

Isaac turned on the radio. He put an elbow out the window. He whistled to himself. The radio cut in and out, but Isaac didn’t seem to notice. Gray static, then a banjo and a harmony so tight it was syrupy, nothing like Sacred Harp—“In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines, I would shiver the whole night through.”

I thought about what Isaac didn’t know. He didn’t know to plant beans in the brassica beds or to breathe gently on the coal to ignite it. He didn’t know how a cow looked for green shoots under the snow in January.