She told me about riding away on a freight train, how her first night the men she met could only find a strand of pig-in-a-bucket cars, truck trailers set in container wells. Queen didn’t want to go in those because they had huge circular holes in the bottom. There was a ledge all around the sides just wide enough to sleep on, but those holes, eight of them down the center of the metal floor, were three feet across, easy to fall through. Right after sunset, Queen heard the crash, crash, crash of all the cars linking together. The train started so slowly she barely noticed—but the holes immediately swallowed her picnic towel, her Chewy bars, her tracksuit.

She said she’d hopped the freight trains because she wanted to get as far away from home as she could, as fast as possible. I guessed she must have liked the romance of it, too. There was no point in anything, I thought, if you couldn’t appreciate the romance. Romance, rule-breaking, feeling awake under the sunset, gazing at Bay’s scarred arms—it was all the same. We’d both wanted a more essential life.

Queen sat up so quickly her head bumped into my chin. “Shhh . . . ,” she said. She looked around, got up, and peered the length of the light-striped hayloft. The wind came through the many slats. “I thought I heard something.” She made me check too.

“Maybe we should stop talking about the past,” I said. I wanted to follow the rules, which meant I was a good family member. Not for the first time, I felt a little superior—I didn’t want her to lead me wrong.

She sat back down next to me and took up another rosemary branch. “I stole from my mom,” she said. “She was a good lady.” Queen spoke lightly, as though she’d discussed this so many times it was no longer painful to her. She crushed rosemary blades in her fingers. I noticed the past tense.

“She died?”

Queen wouldn’t look at me. “She took speed to stay awake. She was trying, in her own way. I was never in the car with her when she wasn’t lit.”

My mother, however clumsy and sad, had tried, over and over, to show me how much she cared. But I couldn’t think about this too long. Besides, she loved an idea of me—not me, the bread stealer who wouldn’t go to college. What Bay told me, back when I first sat in his car, looped through my mind. He said, You who know nothing, love nothing. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love. Maybe if my mother had tried to know me better, I wouldn’t have left. My heart felt tight in my chest, like a walnut pressed in a nutcracker.