“Derby isn’t a pancake man,” Lottie says.
“He tries,” August says.
My heart squeezes.
Lottie’s eyes flick to mine.
I look down at my coffee.
August keeps talking. “He fixes forts good. And he said he doesn’t fake like me.”
The waitress refills my cup at exactly the wrong moment, hears that, and looks like she might cry into the pot.
I want to climb under the table.
Lottie, thankfully, handles it. “Derby don’t fake much except knowing how to behave in public.”
August nods. “He says bad words.”
“He says true words with seasoning.”
I laugh before I can stop myself.
It hurts.
After the diner, the road gets longer.
The country opens wider than I’m used to. Fields flatten. Sky grows bigger. Lottie plays old country, then Southern rock, then something with a woman singing like she has smoked every cigarette and regretted every man. August colors in the back seat. I text no one. Call no one. My old phone is still sitting on Derby’s counter, maybe already found, maybe not.
At some point, guilt stops being sharp and becomes weather.
It surrounds everything.
Sleep comes in broken pieces. I doze against the window and wake thinking I hear Widowmaker. I dream Derby is standing at the side of the road holding the little dinosaur keychain, asking why I took the road if I meant to come back. I wake with tears on my face and August’s small hand on my shoulder from the back seat.
“It’s okay, Mama,” he says.
Those words from my child undo me more than crying ever could.
I reach back and squeeze his hand. “It will be.”
Lottie says nothing.
The next day blurs into gas stations, cheap motels, bad coffee, and Lottie checking under the SUV every time we stop. She makes calls I’m not allowed to hear, using names that sound like jokes until she says them. Harlot. Shortie. Sagebrush. Baby Doll. Once, she says Wild Thing and then catches me listening and smiles like a cat with a stolen bird.
“Names get worse before they get better,” she says.
“Is Hot Mama the better?”
“No, that one is the warning label.”
By the time we cross into Oregon, August is restless, I’m exhausted, and Lottie looks like she could keep driving until the ocean gives up and moves. The landscape changes around us, dry and rugged, pine and rock, wide spaces that feel both empty and watched. The sky sits huge overhead. The road narrows in places, bending through country that doesn’t care how far I ran.
Oregon smells different.
Dust. Pine. Cold earth. Something old.
My chest tightens as signs begin naming places I remember only in pieces.