The sun beat down. I felt it on my hair, on my body.

“We have to leave,” I said.

“And go where?”

“Grammy and Grandpa’s.”

“Honey,” she said. A sob came from out of nowhere. “Honey, we can’t. They died. Two months after we left. On the road back from Tahoe. A big rig.”

Grammy’s fingers on the piano keys.

Grandpa in front of the stove, stirring soup.

The safety of a warm bed.

Dancing.

“Oh,” I said.

My hands went still. I understood then the trouble we were in. Why we had stayed for so long. Why they had never answered when I called them from the 7-Eleven pay phone that first winter when the cold nights left me aching and I thought I could count on them to save me. Instead, the phone had rung and rung and I could hear the ringing, again, as I sat with my mother and learned the truth.

And then I thought of something. “What about the house?” I asked. “Can we go back home?”

“The house is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Sold.”

“What happened to the money?”

She bit her lip. She didn’t answer. And then I saw the master suite with its finished roof. Thought of its marble floor, its golden faucet. “Oh,” I said again, and I tried not to hate her. “We can go somewhere else then,” I said finally. “We can go to the police.”

“And say what? Oh, hi, officers. For nearly a year I’ve raised my daughter with no school and no toilet or shower or doctors. Mila, they’ll take you away from me. They’ll lock me up. And he hasn’t even committed a crime. There’s nothing to go to them for.”

“Then we won’t go to anybody,” I said. “We’ll get a motel room and we’ll figure it out. Don’t you have any money?”

“He takes it all. He keeps it for us.”

I had searched everywhere there was to search, and I never found any money.

“You let him take everything,” I said.

“I have no choice.”

My fists clenched. I made myself breathe and loosened my fingers.

“So, what can we do?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

___

What can we do?

It was suspended in the air between us as the sun shone down. It was still there as we saw him in the distance, as he came nearer. It was there behind every word we spoke that evening. There in the chewing of crackers and the swallowing of water. There in the coffee and the tea. My mother’s hand grazed mine as we did the dishes at the spigot and her touch asked the question. And still there was no answer.

All around us was dry grass, dry brush, the dry branches of dying trees.