Barrett did not begin reading Pig Iron until the third day that he had it. The first two days involved orbiting around it, glancing at it on his coffee table, and feeling a heavy, crushing sensation in his forehead. At nights he would drive around slowly, maybe going to bars, maybe getting fast food, trying to think of things to do just for the sake of doing them.

The town still spoke of the boy who died. Of the girl he had been returning home from after sleeping with. The discussion made Barrett frown. When people asked for his opinion in the wood decor bars with the plastic furniture, he simply shook his head and raised his eyebrows and said nothing. There was nothing to say about it. People did things, and things happened.

“It’s just these kids these days. Girls weren’t like that back when I was a kid. Didn’t need that extra level of temptation going around. Boys are going to take what they’re given. And then someone died. Girls weren’t sneaky like this back in the day. But that’s how it looks to me.”

He thought of Edi, either to distract or punish himself.

Edi had never liked the country. There were plenty of kids like that out here, more since the internet. She didn’t want to fit in. Barrett thought his daughter was a genius, but that she was unsettling. She nitpicked at things, vocalized complaints that seemed pointless (why do you only wear plaid), and was constantly asking (her mother, mind you, never him) if she could dye her hair. It was, on a fundamental level, difficult to relate to his own daughter. She inherited none of his interests. She was on the computer a lot, in her room, reading, writing, watching cartoons. As an adult, mind you, or close enough to one. Edi had made a conscious decision to not fit in. It made Barrett a nervous wreck. He worried that she had no friends and then would try to give her money so she could go out with some people. Amelia always wondered why he was giving her so much money. He never verbalized his concerns.

Barrett would have killed for teenage moodiness. He got teenage aloofness.

In his tiny house on a hill overlooking the Missouri river, alone, Barrett looked through the brush in his backyard that ran to a small cliffside. He thought that it might be a good place for teenagers to sneak off to together to drink or kiss or look at the river at night. He tapped his fingers on his coffee cup and stared into the backyard. He narrowed his eyes. He saw what looked like a seven-foot-tall bipedal forest ape stumble through the foliage before ducking behind a thick plot of honeysuckle.