While Paul wasn’t particularly interested in Disney, I was excited to be going. We had both reached that chill of adolescence that didn’t allow enthusiasm for anything faintly resembling family togetherness, but I couldn’t hide my excitement about going to the place where so many of my peers had already been. If only my mother had been the woman in the front seat, and a real brother, a younger one, beside me, it would have been perfect. But Adele was in the front, Paul beside me, and a curiously quiet father in the driver’s seat. Adele talked. It was her thing, her right, and her most killing attribute. The woman never shut up.

She had recently taken to expecting me to become a slut. What I remember most about that family trip to Florida was Adele’s reaction when I came out of the hotel bathroom with my eyebrows plucked. I had found her tweezers and gone to town, weeding through the thicket that was my most embarrassing feature. Following the recommendations in a teen magazine, I had spent an hour “shaping” my unruly brows. They had gone from overhang to slender silkworms poised over my suddenly enhanced brown eyes. It was like raising a shade to a sunny day.

Needing no further evidence of my inevitable downslide into slutdom, Adele punished me in the way she saw as the most convenient. I spent the entire vacation in the hotel room, the television my only entertainment. My father didn’t make a single protest. Not once did he assert himself and overrule Adele. Not then, and certainly not later, when the stakes were so much higher.

When I left home at seventeen, a stolen fifty-dollar bill tucked in my pocket and an overstuffed suitcase dragging behind me, I wasn’t leaving because of Adele’s miserable treatment; I was leaving because my father had finally proved that he didn’t love me.

* * *

The daylight in the cab has faded; the late-September sun behind them slips away into a pale sunset. Artie has mostly stopped his muttering. The cell has also stopped honking. Justine has not appeared, and Mack is less certain that she will be able to. The forward motion of the truck has been steady except for those places where Artie brakes and dances on the pedals and they slow down through little doorways where men or women stand and wave at them. Mack lifts his head at each of these, with the fleeting hope that Justine will be there, waving from one of those little doors. Waiting for them to find her.

From his nest in the bunk, Mack decides that he is hungry enough to mention it to Artie. As a dog used to long stretches of waiting, he has an internal clock that is on Greenwich dog time. He’s well past his usual dinnertime; he is well past his usual outside time. He knows this and has allowed that these couple of days on the road have changed his routine significantly. But he was still getting fed and walked at regular intervals. If he could tell time, he’d know that it had been nearly seven hours without a break. If he could read an odometer, he’d know that there were about five hundred miles between himself and Justine. If he could read a map, he’d know that he was in New York State, bearing down on Albany. The only thing Mack can read is his hunger and his thirst.