Somehow, I am sure he’ll be a traveling baby, happy in his car seat, letting the sound of the road lull him to sleep. Once we reach the mainland, Max gets quiet in my belly while I drive, so maybe he’s already in love with the road. I’m happy to have him with me. To feel like I’m not completely alone. I don’t like the middle of Florida—cows and farmland and I feel like alligators and giant snakes must be lurking in every body of water. I drive straight through to the Georgia border. I don’t drink anything so I won’t have to stop to pee.

Once, when I was in Boston, my friend Slim called the bar where I was playing to say he was recording a single for some country singer and my exact voice was what he needed to fill out the sound. I drove all the way from Boston to Nashville after my gig. Right on through. I couldn’t see straight by the time I got there, but Slim pumped me full of coffee and tuned my guitar and I was fine. The song didn’t really take off, but every once in a while, if I leave a country station on long enough, I’ll hear it on the radio and I can pick out my voice singing oohs and awahoos through the static. That road trip was killer. This one is worse—I don’t even want to get where I’m going—but I make it over a thousand miles with only four stops and a quick nap, pregnancy bladder and back pain and everything.

Fifth stop is when I call Margo just after I cross the Pennsylvania border to tell her I’m four or five hours away.

“Oh, girlie,” she says. “He’s already gone.”

And here I am, some dirty, stinky, hungry, pregnant girl, crying into a truck stop pay phone like a damn country song.

“I drove too slow,” I whisper, two dimes later when I can finally talk again.

“You know that old saying about procrastination on your part doesn’t equal an emergency on mine?” Margo says. “Your father made this an emergency, not you. He had three years to make things better. He had three years to come looking for you.”

She listens to me sob on the phone and there’s something about knowing she’s listening that makes my tears seem less futile. She’s my witness. She always has been.

She asks me to come for the funeral.

“I can’t do it,” I tell her. “I can’t come back. I don’t want to see Irene and the boy and I don’t want to see that baby. I don’t want to. He’s already dead. It’s not like he cares if I’m there.”