The song changed, and now she could hear the individual voices of the family singing along—Winnie off-key and Sam with his unbroken voice that would soon start cracking. Nigel, who was a good singer, sang around them, harmonizing with their squeaks and squawks in good humor.

She ate the canned beans for lunch, listening along with the Crouches’ movie: Sense and Sensibility (Winnie had won at rock paper scissors). That evening, Nigel opened the door for the pizza they’d ordered, and Juno heard the rain really coming down.

“Is that thunder?” Nigel’s voice was incredulous. She could picture him peering over the pizza guy’s shoulder toward the flashing in the sky.

“Yeah, there’s a lightning storm. Pretty cool.”

Pizza girl, Juno corrected herself. When she’d first come to Seattle it had surprised her that thunder did not often accompany the watery days. In her old life, she would have told anyone that she liked the sound of the clouds colliding, but in this life, it scared the shit out of her.

An awful memory bloomed as she lay on the closet floor. The first time she’d not had the money to pay for her dirty little room at the Motel Palm she’d slept in her car, pushing the seats down and laying an old comforter across the trunk space. The lightning had woken her from an alcohol-induced sleep. And five seconds after she opened her eyes, Juno had thought a semi was rolling over her car. Thunder bellowed from nearby, and then the rain had come in fat, fast drops. Bullet rain being shot from some heavenly AK47.

Realizing that she wasn’t in immediate danger had done little to soothe the fear and despair that had woken up with her. She wasn’t going to die right now, but her ticket had been expedited with her disease. It was up in the air how—if hunger or cold or being hit by lightning could outrace the lupus, but she was fine with that. It was all talk; she was a small woman without options, without friends. Regardless, it had rained for three days while Juno lay huddled in her gasless Prius, stranded in a Walmart parking lot. She’d run in for food and to use the restroom, but had otherwise remained sedentary, frightened, and in shock.

What now? What now? That thought marched through her head, demanding to be heard. She didn’t know what happened now. She’d given answers to people during her career, and yet here she was as answerless and lost as any of them had been.