JESSE

THE HOOD IS WARM UNDER my hand. Engine's been off twenty minutes but the metal holds heat the way it holds everything else, slow to let go.

I stand there. Hand on the paint. Not moving.

"What's happening, Pops?"

The parking lot is empty except for a pickup truck three spaces down and a sedan with Arizona plates and a bumper sticker that says JESUS IS MY CO-PILOT. The neon cactus buzzes overhead. Green. Red. Green. A moth the size of my thumb keeps throwing itself at the light. Over and over. Like it thinks this time will be different.

I can feel her crying.

That's the part I can't get past. I'm standing out here, forty feet from the room, and I can feel a woman I've known since this afternoon crying into a motel pillow. My grief. She's crying about my grief. My dad, my garage, my life... and she's in there feeling it like it's hers, like she has any right to it, like she earned even one second of what it cost me to carry that weight for eight months.

She didn't earn it. It was taken from me and handed to her and I didn't get a say.

I press my palm flat against the hood. The paint is smooth where I waxed it last month. There's a spot near the driver's side headlight where a rock kicked up on I-44 and left a chip the size of a pencil eraser. I've been meaning to touch it up. Haven't gotten to it.

Won't matter soon. Richard in Brentwood will handle it. Richard with his twelve-car garage and his soft hands.

"I'm selling you, Pops. I'm sorry. I gotta sell you."

The Chevelle doesn't answer. She just sits there, ticking, cooling, being what she's always been. A car that belongs to a dead man. Richard in Brentwood will never understand what the cigarette burns in the armrest mean. That's not his job.

I pull my phone out.

Scroll to Genesis. Her name sits on the screen and I can picture her exactly: on the couch in Atlanta, baby Kenan on her lap, probably asleep, probably drooling on her shoulder. She answers every call on the first ring because that's who she is. She'd listen. She'd say the right thing. She always says the right thing.

I put the phone back in my pocket.

What am I gonna tell her? Hey, Gen, so I picked up a stranger in Flagstaff and now she can feel my emotions and I have a mark on my wrist that looks like somebody drew it with a hot needle and I don't know what's happening but I'm standing in a parking lot in Kingman talking to Dad's car like he can hear me.

Genesis would get on a plane. Genesis would drive from Atlanta to Arizona and drag me home by the ear and make me see a doctor and do everything short of calling Auntie Ijeoma in Enugu.

I can't do that to her. She's got Kenan. She's got her husband. She's got a life that doesn't include her little brother's whatever-this-is.

The moth hits the neon sign again. A dry tap. It falls, rights itself, flies back up.

I start walking toward the room. Get halfway across the lot. Stop.

I don't want to go in there. She felt me. She felt the thing about my dad and she said it out loud like it was just a fact she'd picked up, like my grief was a signal she'd tuned into by accident. And the worst part, the part that made me slam the door, is that she described it perfectly. A weight in her chest. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it's been since March.

Nobody has ever described it right. Not Genesis, not the grief counselor the hospital recommended, not Terrence on his last day when he said "Your pops was a good man." They all said words that circled around it. She walked straight into the middle of it and stood there.

I don't know what to do with that.

I walk back to the car. Lean against the fender. Cross my arms.

I walk back toward the room. Get to the door. My hand touches the knob.

I stand there.

The A/C is rattling through the wall. The cactus is buzzing above me. The moth is still going.

Above the door, the moth hits the neon cactus one more time. Then it stops. Just hovers there, wings going, not moving forward, not pulling back.

I go in.

She's sitting on her bed with her legs crossed and her phone in her lap and her face completely dry. Like she mopped herself up in the two minutes since I walked out. Her eyes are a little swollen. She's not going to acknowledge that and I'm not going to mention it.

She hears me come in and stands up. Then she heads for the bathroom without looking at me. The door closes. Water runs. She's in there for a while. I hear the faucet, then nothing, then the faucet again. Splashing her face. Same thing I did an hour ago.

I sit on my bed. Pull off my boots. Line them up next to the nightstand because my dad raised me to keep my shoes together and I've never broken the habit.

She comes out. Her ponytail is tighter now, redone, every strand pulled back into place. She's rebuilt herself. I can see the effort in how straight she's holding her shoulders.

She moves toward her bed, then changes her mind and walks to the window instead. Pulls the curtain aside an inch. Looks out at the parking lot. At the Chevelle. At the neon cactus doing its broken strobe.

She lets the curtain fall. Turns around. Leans against the windowsill. Looks at the floor.

We're two people in a small room trying to be in it without being in it together.

"We gotta set rules," I say.

She looks up. "Rules. For a magical curse."

"Rules for us. I don't want you in my head."

"I don't want to be there."

"Good. So rule one: if you feel something from me, you don't say it. You keep it to yourself."

"Same goes for you."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Rule two," I say. "We leave at four AM. You need to be in LA by nine, right?"

"Eight-thirty, ideally. I want time to..."

"Four AM. That gives us five hours plus a cushion."

"Okay."

"Rule three. When we get to LA, we go our separate ways. You do your interview. I do my thing. We don't talk about this."

"And the marks?"

I look at my wrist. The spiral sits there, red and patient. "We deal with that later."

"Later when?"

"Later later."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. For once, she lets it go.

"Can I add a rule?" she says.

"Go ahead."

"No testing. No 'think about something and see if I feel it.' No experiments. We don't poke at this."

"Agreed."

"Okay."

"Okay."

We look at each other for a second. Then we both look away, like we rehearsed it.

She sits on her bed. Pulls out her phone. Scrolls through something. I can see the screen reflected in her glasses, dense text, small font. Interview prep, probably. She's going to sit there and study for a job interview twelve hours from now like her wrist isn't branded with a symbol neither of us can explain.

I lie down. Face the wall. The comforter smells like dryer sheets and something sour underneath. I pull it up to my chest and close my eyes.

I can feel her.

The rules don't cover this. The rules say don't mention it. They don't say anything about what to do when you're lying three feet from a stranger and you can feel her thinking like a radio station bleeding through a wall. It's not loud. It's not clear. It's a texture. A pressure behind my sternum that shifts when she shifts. Right now: anxiety. A tight, buzzing frequency pulled almost past bearing. She's going through interview questions in her head. I can tell because the anxiety spikes in intervals, question, fear, answer, relief, question, fear, answer, relief. A loop. She's been running this loop for a long time. This is what her brain does when she's scared. It studies.

I almost turn over. Almost say something. You're going to do fine. Which is stupid because I don't know that and I don't know her and it's not my business.

The anxiety fades. Slowly. Her breathing changes, longer, deeper. She's giving up on studying. Too tired.

And then, underneath the buzz, something else. Warm. Quiet. Like a candle in a window. An old woman's voice, speaking a language I don't know. Something about folding. Something about pinching dough. The warmth of a kitchen. Flour on a countertop. Small hands, wrinkled hands, showing smaller hands how to fold something shut.

Her grandmother.

The memory is so gentle it almost makes me turn over. Almost makes me say what is that? That thing you're thinking about? Because whatever it is, it's the only good thing I've felt all day.

I don't turn over.

She falls asleep first. I know because the buzzing stops. The anxiety loop goes quiet. The interview questions release their grip. For a second there's nothing between us. Just silence. The A/C and the cactus and the moth outside and two strangers lying in the dark.

Then I feel something I haven't felt in eight months.

Peace. Warm and total. Like a hand on the back of my neck. Like someone saying it's okay, you can stop now, you can rest.

I don't know if it's mine or hers.

I don't care.

I close my eyes.