I pull off the parkway and stop at the light beside a middle-aged man in a matte black Corvette. Sports-car menopause, I think. The back window is plastered with stickers: MYERS FOR PRESIDENT!; I’M SURE PURE, ARE YOU?; and MAKE AMERICA MORAL AGAIN! He honks, waits for me to turn my head, and rolls down his window. I do the same, thinking he wants directions around the labyrinthine Washington streets with their devilish diagonal avenues.

He spits into my car as the light turns from red to green, then roars off.

I realize I’ve still got the other candidate’s sticker on my back bumper.

What would Jackie do? Speed on after him? Probably. Spit back? Likely. What’s on my mind, though, is what Patrick would do: absolutely nothing.

He’d sigh and shake his head at the barbarism, and then he’d clean up the mess of phlegm and forget about Mr. Midlife Crisis. And Lorenzo? Lorenzo would beat the living shit out of the bastard.

For some reason, I find that appealing. I didn’t use to. It hits me that I’ve turned into more of a Jackie than I expected, and suddenly I want to see her again more than anything.

I doubt she wants to see me, and even if she does, Jackie’s in a place where the word “visitor” doesn’t exist.

Jackie is in a camp (Say it, Jean: prison) somewhere in the middle of the country, where she works on a farm or ranch or fish hatchery from morning to night. Her hair—whatever color it last was—shows graying roots and split ends, and her arms are red with the sunburn of a farmer’s tan. A redneck tan, we used to call it, the kind that leaves your shoulders pale. She wears a wide metal bracelet that does not display any numbers because, in Jackie’s new world, there are no words to count. Like the women in the supermarket, the ones with those small babies, who did nothing more than try to finger spell a bit of gossip, a message of comfort, a mundane little I miss talking to you, too.

Jackie Juarez, feminist turned prisoner, now sleeps at night in a cell with a man she doesn’t know.

I saw a documentary about these conversion camps on television last fall. Steven had turned it on.

“Freaks,” he said. “Serves them right.”

The last of my words flew out, little daggers aimed at my oldest son, who had begun acting less like my son and more like Reverend Carl Corbin. “You don’t really believe that, kiddo.”

He muted the television as an endless line of men and women marched from a hole in a concrete wall toward the working farm. Jeeps with armed soldiers flanked the parade of prisoners.