The smell of petroleum has always thrilled me, pulling into a gas station the closest I’ve come in recent years to having religion. The full-body shivers of pleasure, the low-down pulse as I inhale and inhale, then once again. God a shadow on the horizon compared to the highs of middle school. At ten, eleven, twelve I sniffed markers, Elmer’s, shoe polish, lighter refills, nail polish remover, whipped cream chargers. The rush, the push of glee was followed by giggles, by dreaminess that wasn’t blankness. I spun, a silkworm in its cocoon.

In middle school, I was cold. I lived with Dave, my father, a restless man, a controlling man. I met him for the first time when I was nine, when Alice, my mother, a sad woman, a silent woman, lost custody of me. Child neglect, the family court decreed. Temporary custody that became sole custody through no effort on Dave’s, or Alice’s, part. Dave moved me from Southern California clear across the country, near the border between New York and Canada, replacing light and heat, traffic jams, and smoggy, saltwater air with lake-effect snow, walls of pine trees, and the half-century remains of industry.

I never adjusted to Dave’s heating preferences: portable kerosene heaters and the open oven door. To save money. To “build character.” All-day socks and boots, the inevitable athlete’s feet. Raw fingers, fish-belly face. The glue warmed me, though, from my toenails to the tips of the hair on my head. I became pink, sweet, loose. Not just bigger, but big. Huge. Right before my blood pressure dropped and I passed out.

Dave was also a violent man. On a September evening before I turned thirteen, we got into a fight, louder and longer, harder than usual. I was short for my age, spindly and narrow-shouldered, no choice but to go deep inside myself, focus my gaze on the triangle of air formed by Dave’s shoulder, temple, and neck. I allowed myself to fall. I covered my head. But that day, I balked. I ran to my room and wedged a chair under the doorknob. When Dave got to me, I couldn’t stop screaming.

The next morning—throat raw, eyes red—I limped to my bike. I hung a to-go bag of glue from the handlebar. For miles I pedaled, sniffed, walked, pedaled, sniffed, until I found myself at the top of a long, tall hill. On the way down, my tires barely touched the ground. “I can’t take it anymore,” I rasped into the wind. “I can’t take it anymore. I can’ttakeitanymorecan’ttakeitcan’t…”

At the bottom of the hill was a sharp curve. In the middle of the sharp curve were pine trees. “Steer your way past them without using your hands,” the devil on my right shoulder suggested. “Don’t you want to know what happens next?” the devil on my left shoulder asked.

I took my hands off the bar. I closed my eyes.

I never told this story to Mona. Perhaps because it was true.

Dave’s ex-girlfriends: bony, brittle, blonde. An interchangeable cast of lunchtime beer drinkers and ultra-light chain-smokers. Mothers on a mission to find a man. Low expectations, tight-lipped smiles.

Mona had a body like a 1940s movie star, light brown skin that darkened after a morning in the sun. She was kid-free, alcohol-free. Her dark hair hung in long, loose curls she constantly fussed with. She’d flip them away from her face, behind her shoulder, in front of her shoulder, back across her face, like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to show off her features—baby-fat cheeks dipped in freckles; inexplicably white, straight teeth; broad forehead and crooked nose—or hide them. She waved her arms around (slapped the table, poked me with her feet) when she talked; popped hard candies one after the other into her mouth, only to crunch down on them in seconds. When she laughed, she threw back her head and cackle-snorted. Well after the joke had ended, Mona was still laughing.

“An early Christmas present,” Dave crowed. He’d found her on his latest road trip, decided straightaway he’d keep her. His cologne—boozy up top, a diseased deer smell underneath—clogged my nostrils. “Twenty-one and likes me just as I am. Not like the grasping bitches ‘round these parts, always hoping I’ll change.”

“God, no. Not that,” I said. Dave gave me a thump to the back, unusually friendly, that still reduced my half-grown self to hands and knees.

No matter her differences from the exes, I knew Mona and Dave would end the same way: with tears and screams, broken bottles and cans of baked beans become missiles. Best to stay away. Ear towards my bedroom door, I waited for the tip-tap, clip-clop of heels on vinyl floor, the scratch-grind of tires on gravel, the particular stillness a house dons when you’re its only occupant. Alone, I could relax. Get high and watch TV; pick my nose and scratch my nuts.

But Mona didn’t go anywhere. She lounged around the house in Dave’s waffle knits, his flannels and wool sweaters, the sleeves hanging well past her hands; in sweatpants she pegged above her ankles; in fuzzy crocodile slippers with pom-poms on the toes. She commandeered the living room—couch, rug, recliner—where she flipped through fashion magazines and read the liner notes of Dave’s records. Mostly, though, she groomed herself: nails, hair, face. Hour after hour, single-minded as a cat. Long strands of her hair stuck to the walls, coffee table, floor. They stood upright, swayed in an invisible breeze. Hour after hour the television was turned to the soaps. Through my bedroom door I heard Mona talk to the characters, like Dave talked to the radio announcers who kept him up-to-date on the Yankees, Giants, Rangers.

“Stop thinking with your dick! That’s her evil twin!”

“Whiny, goody two-shoes. No one cares about your dead baby.”

“Rip that bitch’s throat out!”

I waited, a mixture of eagerness and dread, for Dave to snap. “Another useless mouth in my house. Do I look like I’m made of money?” But Dave said nothing when Mona asked for a properly heated house, cable TV, a microwave and stocked freezer. Only nodded as he looked at her with an expression—not irritated or aggrieved, not amused or indulgent—I didn’t recognize. It took me some time to decipher it.

As deep winter set in, Mona left the couch, rug, recliner. To roust the dust that squatted on the TV, banish coffee cup rings from countertops, ferry cigarette butts and beer bottles to the trash. She sidled up to Dave and a washing machine materialized in the bathroom. She hung my underwear, tattered gray, on a line in the backyard. She filled the house with the smells of frying onions and sausage, roasting potatoes and chicken.

“Don’t you get bored?” I was slouched on the counter, swigging from a bottle of chocolate milk. Mona was at the stove, making me a bacon and grilled cheese sandwich. (“No tomato are you crazy,” I squawked as she layered multiple slices on hers.)

“Nothing comes for free,” she’d told me weeks earlier, when I slunk into the kitchen and tried to eat her spaghetti and meatballs straight from the pot. She batted my hands with metal tongs, stomped on my foot when I went back for more. “Want my food? Stay here. Talk to me.”

“And if I don’t wanna pay?”

She clacked the tongs against my stomach, where there was no excess flesh to clasp. “Suit yourself.”

Mona slid the frying pan into the oven (“so the cheese melts evenly and the bread doesn’t burn”) and tossed me a slice of bacon. The open window let in smells and sounds: the earthy spring air, the drip-plop of melting snow, the pew-pew-rurr-pew-rurrr-buzzzzzzz of machinery. Dave was on the neighboring lot, in his garage, a converted barn that dwarfed our four-room house. There, every object had its place, existed for a single reason: to serve Dave. There was one key, which Dave kept on him. No one was allowed inside the garage without permission. Not me, not his helpers, not his girlfriends, and Mona was no exception.

“Course I’m bored. Why do you think I’m doing this?” With a hand wrapped in a dish towel, Mona pulled the pan from the oven and smiled at the bread, the right side of golden-brown. A twist of her wrist. Clink-clink rang the charms on the bracelet I never saw her without. My sandwich slid onto a plate.

“You like housework.” One-third joke. “You’re a girl and that’s what girls do.” One-third poking Mona with a sharp stick. “You need to stay on Dave’s good side.” One-third because I thought it was true.

In one motion she unfurled the dish towel and slapped it against my cheek. “That’s not how I stay on his good side, moron.”

I grabbed for it; missed. “You’re disgusting.”

Mona watched me chew, sip, chew. A tomato seed was wedged, gelatinous yellow-green, between her top teeth. She worried it with her tongue, her fingernail.

“Gotcha!” She offered it to me on a pinky nail.

“Fuck off.”

“Suit yourself.” Mona flicked the seed; it landed next to my thigh. She pulled a chunk of hair over her face and examined the tips. “This town sucks.”

“Why don’t you leave?”

She shrugged.

“Nowhere else to go?” I taunted. “Dave’s the best you can do?”

She flipped her hair behind her shoulders, bounced on her toes like a boxer. “Like you’re any better? Where’s your mommy, Mark?” she sing-songed as she moved closer, the better to poke me in the chest with five pointy, painted nails. “Doesn’t she love you?”

I pressed my finger on the tomato seed and brought it to my mouth. I swallowed it. I shrugged.

Dave was a decent mechanic, with a reputation for honesty. He performed no unnecessary flushes or brake repairs, didn’t push for brand-new tires when a patch would do. People from out of town brought him their problems. He took pride in his ability to build a business, to make his customers and business associates his friends. “Not just anyone can move into these small towns and make a go of it,” he informed me. “They all know each other, never lived anywhere else. Neither did their parents or grandparents. You’d think they’d welcome fresh blood: a new face, a new story. You’d be wrong. But if you bring them something they really need, and you’re the right kind of person, they’ll reconsider. Slow, because that’s what they are.”

Dave was a better thief. He focused on homes: third-degree burglary, no weapons. He had the face for it, round and pleasant, no distinguishing features. The body for it, strong and compact, the beginnings of a dad belly that made him appear safe. For three years, I went with him as he engaged in what he referred to as “the work.” A complicated series of road trips, garage openings and closings, target recon and entry, driving and driving, that I never got a true handle on, no matter that I was present for it. Vintage Car Restoration. Dave had a business card printed up, to explain his absences. Every once in a while, that’s truly why he left town.

On the road, my job was to obey orders. More importantly, it was to witness, to perform my highly circumscribed duties and be dazzled by Dave’s brilliance. Sure, I was scared. If Dave was caught, if I was caught, where would I go? A place far worse. I was also proud. I was Dave’s confidante and accomplice, sworn to secrecy, included in a way of life that was not like others, that laughed at others. A way of life I was suddenly excluded from.

“You’re not the same,” Dave said, the first time he told me to stay home. It wasn’t a compliment, but I couldn’t disagree.

I wasn’t the same after I slammed into a tree at twenty-five miles an hour and ping-ponged the spongy lobes of my brain against the stony calcium of my skull; broke my collarbone, ribs, leg, wrist; shat myself; and spent three weeks in bed. The accident might explain my actions that summer with Mona: 1995. After my bones healed and my head stopped spinning, I found myself willing—eager, even—to step outside the box Dave had stuffed me in.

Or maybe boredom’s a better explanation. When I was on the road with Dave, I wished for the monotony of home. When faced with the monotony of home, I felt…at loose ends.

Or maybe I should blame it on the drugs, further bruising my black-and-blue brain. Or my misplaced teenage pride; my longing, verging on the desperate, for someone to take me seriously.

Or maybe it’s because I was fourteen, and in love.

Eighth grade was ending. I stood by my mailbox, backpack over my shoulder, and gazed through the living room window. Thump, thump. No one had seen me snag a six-pack from the fridge, a pack of cigarettes from the kitchen table. No one had heard the back door slam. Mona was out of her pajamas, in tight jeans and a tighter shirt, glitter in her hair. Her eyes were smokey, her lips hard red. Heels tilted her chest forward, ass back as she shimmied in place, wanting to dance, not caring if anyone joined her.

Thump, thump. The bass rattled the windows, reverberated down the driveway, filled my head, heart, belly, lungs. Dave now had more than records. He had a turntable, an amp and speakers, a crowd of customer-friends-associates, law-abiding electricians, waitresses, barbers, cleaners, roofers, shelf stockers, policemen, nurses who appreciated his enhanced hospitality. He had both paws on Mona, that mysterious expression—not lustful or jealous, not pleased or excited—on his face. I watched Mona lean into Dave, wriggle away; watched Dave haul her back by her belt-loops; watched her squeals of mock-protest.

We lived on the edge of town, where the houses, block by block, dwindled in size and number and the trees did the opposite. Flashlight in hand, I walked the road away from town, under a moon that was white, or orange, or yellow, or perhaps hidden behind clouds, towards a narrow section of river spanned by a railroad bridge that seventy-car freight trains regularly chugged along. Back against a steel pier, surrounded by weeds, crushed empties and night songs, I drank and sniffed; I watched what drifted through my mind. Hours passed like minutes. The water glittered blue and gold. From the hammock of a hollowed-out tree trunk, half a mile from the railroad bridge, the sun rose over the dirty-white towers of a long-closed cement plant.

Summer began with a heat wave: cloudy skies, empty rumbles and flashes. The hours, thick and wet, slowed.

Dave liked to keep moving, but Mona kept him close. One month turned into three turned into seven. Dave didn’t leave. Not for a robbing road trip, not for a chance to be somewhere other than our faded town.

I figured it wouldn’t last, it couldn’t last, and I was right.

Like a bear that overslept, emerged from hibernation only after the leaves were a waxy, dark green, Dave’s steps became heavy. He scented the air and rumbled. His thumps returned to their unfriendly norm.

“I explain and explain,” he roared, when I forgot to set my alarm, say please and thank you, hand over my pay. “Why don’t you listen? Where do you go?”

“I don’t know,” I answered once, overcome by honesty.

Too early on another gray morning, only awake because of the cash Dave demanded from me and the summer construction job that generated it, I walked into the kitchen and saw asscheeks peeking from cotton underwear. Mona was on tiptoes on a chair, rooting around a cabinet. On the backs of her thighs were black-and-blue prints: four per leg in tipsy lines.

“Gotcha!”

Mona jumped down, cereal box in hand. A welt stretched red from her chin down her neck, disappearing into the collar of her T-shirt. She caught me staring at her arms, more fingerprints, and curled her lip. “See something you like?”

“No.” I left the kitchen by the back door, breakfast forgotten, and hopped on my bike. Thirteen miles to the jobsite.

As I rolled past the garage, I saw Dave heaving up its metal door. He was scowling, growling, furious. Only after the mysterious expression left his face did I understand what I’d seen: peace. For a few months, Dave hadn’t wanted for anything.

Mona and I were on the front steps, crunching cheese puffs, slurping Mountain Dew, when Dave’s foot none-too-gently pushed us apart.

He was leaving town. He needed a break. Don’t ask him where, why, how long, presume we had a right to know shit.

Mona flounced. She clung to Dave and slobbered him with kisses, then tried on nonchalance, positive breeziness. “Don’t worry, I’ll be safe. Mark’ll protect me if a big, bad man tries to break in. Won’t you?”

“Make sure she stays out of trouble,” Dave ordered as he turned the ignition in the Skylark, Colonial Yellow, hundred thousand miles and change, ignoring Mona’s outraged brows and stompy-feet, her grousing about his possessiveness. “And a friendly reminder for you, son. Lose your job? I’ll cut strips of flesh from your calves. You’ll eat them for supper.”

Dave was a fanatic for accounting, scrupulously tabulating my debts and payments, what I owed him for taking me in. He’d gotten me the job so I could pay him back. My post-accident hospital stay had left me in the permanent red.

He was right to worry about trouble. Mona stayed home that night—was Dave testing her, setting a trap for her?—then slinked away. To a friend-associate-customer with a death wish, a man from one of the few outside-the-house establishments Mona agreed to set foot in: the grocery store or the bar with the pool tables, two doors down from the Lutheran church. I never learned the specifics. Monday to Saturday, I turned left at the end of the driveway, turned left twice more and was on the main drag. I rolled past the places, the old lady beauty parlor, the “vintage” store, the bar without pool tables, the hardware store, the Hunan House, that were still closed. I rolled past the places, the diner, the Methodist church, the other diner and the gas station, that weren’t; rolled past Town Hall with its commemorative plaques, trees and statues, going all the way back to the 1800s; rolled past the antique store with its display of baby doll heads in the window, a store whose sign was never flipped to open, though once I’d seen a flicker of yellow eyes amongst the corpse-blue and practically shat myself. Here, I turned left a final time. I cruised past the dollar store, the state-run liquor store, the Goodwill and the convenience store that specialized in cheap, just-expired groceries, a jumble of warehouses that some claimed was mob-owned though Dave said no way—to the one-lane road that paralleled the highway. Where I turned right.

Mona was asleep when I left and, when I returned home nine hours later, she was gone. She wasn’t subtle or stealthy, but her pre-dawn entrances never woke me. I was worn out from my days of construction, my work on a mall that was an anachronism as we built it. A shrine to failed commerce, a ghost town that twenty years later would show up on photo blogs with titles like America Is Dead.

Days into Dave’s absence, Mona cruised through the back door, squeak-slam. An empty can hit the sink, clatter-rattle. She skipped through the kitchen, slip-slap, singing raucously off key.

I lay on the lumpy oatmeal couch, eyes on the living room door. Mona smothered her yodel of surprise with her trademarks: fist on jutting hip, defiant chin, unblinking eye-contact. Bluffs undercut by her open palm, bouncing against her thigh. She wore a feedlot cap and flip-flops, a washed thin T-shirt that grazed the tops of her thighs. Through it, I saw her bikini. She shifted her weight forward; she jabbed first.

“They fire you?”

I saw a triangle of wet spots: breast, breast, crotch.

“Got off early.”

Her nipples, hardening in response to the living room fan.

“Maybe tomorrow, then.”

Her belly-button and the ring that pierced it.

“You love Dave so much you want to be alone with him and his moods? That’s what’ll happen if I lose my job.”

“Like you’re good company? Like we’re friends? Family? Why should I feel sad when he kicks you out?”

“You’ll be gone, not me. After he learns you’ve been running around on him, he’ll beat you till you’re half dead, then drop you off at the rest stop, the one with all the truckers. Why shouldn’t they have their fun?”

“You won’t say a damn thing.”

“Why not?”

“Same reason I wouldn’t rat you out for fighting, getting high, vandalism. People talk. ‘That kid of Dave’s…’ Not me.”

Post-accident, I’d become not just quick to forget, but quick to anger.

“Because you’re that nice?”

“Because,” Mona said, none of her usual flourishes—smirk, head toss, tick-ticking feet; nasal As, Rs where they weren’t needed, elongated Ys when Rs were called for—on display. Her affect was as flat as flat could be. “I hate your dad as much as you do.”

The next day, she picked me up at work.

Even if our slice of country had prospects—which it didn’t—Dave never would’ve been so careless, so short-sighted as to work the area. “Amateurs react. ‘My wife said her doctor’s on a cruise. Everyone knows doctors are rich.’ When he goes in? Finds out the doc doesn’t believe in electronics, jewelry, cash. Just paintings might be worth something if Joe Stupid knew a damn thing about art, was ready to cut them from their frames, had someone to fence them. Me? I act. Teach folks the most important lesson: be more careful with what you love.”

Dave believed in research, in taking his time. In a town not too big or small, he thoroughly studied its residents and their possessions before swooping in. Everything Dave acquired was quickly sold, with a small number of items warehoused outside the state. Cash, rarely spent, was squirreled away.

“Where do you keep it?” I asked in the early days, before I knew better.

Dave graced me with his carnivore smile. “If I told you that,” he said gently, “I’d have to kill you.”

Dave was sincere about mechanics, Mona, making me earn my keep. He was sincere about his criminal activities, being an upstanding member of his upstate community, and conserving money. He didn’t understand most people weren’t like him. They had no long-term goals, no statements they wished to make. Like animals, they were bounded by their territory. Like animals, they used their energy to protect their skin, maintain their strength, scrounge for freedom.

He learned this lesson eventually, but I couldn’t tell you if it stuck. It wasn’t my intention to teach him. I’ve never been one for plans or follow-through. All I wanted was for Mona to see me. For our time together to continue. For how I felt when I was with her to never end. When Mona and I were talking I was right there, nowhere else.

I say this to you, who think I’ve done you wrong, from the distance of twenty-five years and twenty-four hundred miles, though the memory is too hot, too bright. My fingers blister, my eyes stream. My mouth fills with regret that tastes bitter and chunky. This is a story about the worst thing that’s happened to me, and also the best. This is a story about the worst thing I’ve done to someone, and the best thing I’ve done for myself. This is how I freed myself from Dave. The path after wasn’t smooth. I stumbled and fell, brought others who weren’t you crashing down with me. But I was free.

All, I swear, by accident.

For every scar, Mona had a story.

The raised skin on her thigh: “I was with this guy. He was in a gang that sold drugs. Small town shit. Club drugs, weed, pills. Mostly they liked tearing around on their Yamahas. Everyone had to get branded, show they had big balls, grapefruit-sized. One day this old lady with a gun threatened to shoot out their tires if they kept driving by her house. I was giving them a hard time. ‘Fucking limp dicks! Too chicken-shit to pistol-whip a grandma!’ They said I was all talk so I said, ‘Burn me,’ then set fire to her garage.”

The crookedness of her fingers: “This girl, insanely jealous of me, had her boyfriend hold my fingers in a door while she slammed it. Almost passed out when I saw my bones.”

The silvery squiggle down her shin: “I met this metal band, hung out with them while they toured college towns. Lemme tell you, drugs and setup-teardown don’t mix.”

The half-moon on her knee: “Got picked up by a dad in a station wagon, a My Daughter’s on the Honor Roll at Podunk High! bumper sticker. He asked me how old I was. I told him the truth, fifteen. Figured he’d buy me dinner, gimme cash, that could be his daughter. Instead, he starts preaching about the devil leading young girls astray. We’re in Arkansas. He’s talking fast—drive Satan out with whips, sticks, stakes! Driving faster. Soon we’ll be not just nowhere but the middle of nowhere. Had to jump out. Thank God for manual locks.”

The thin lines on her inner arms: “Doesn’t everyone cut themselves? Feels good.”

For Christmas, Dave had given Mona a car, an ‘86 Mustang GT he’d cleaned up, inside and out. A teal paint job, all the rage at the time, and Mona tried not to pout it wasn’t cherry red. Dave gave Mona gas money, too. Not sufficient to leave the state but enough to get places, in this place where the towns gave each other ample breathing room.

A car that doubled as a long leash.

In the Mustang—after she picked me up from work, before she left on her evening adventures—Mona told me stories, and I tried telling them.

“She said…”

“Bullshit.”

“Then I…”

“Yawn.”

“This one time.”

“Blech.”

“C’mon, Mona.”

“C’moooonnn, Mark.”

“What d’you want from me?”

“For you not to be stupid, not waste the time I’m nice—”

“Bored.”

“Nice enough to give you.”

“What’m I supposed to talk about? I haven’t done what you have.”

“You watch, though. You must’ve seen something interesting, all the staring you do.” She pumped her wrist. “Memorizing for later.”

“No! I don’t!” My voice cracked.

“I’ve seen you.”

“No! You haven’t!”

I waited for Mona’s cackle-snorts, her shouts of “liar liar!” She only frowned, stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked on it.

“There’s something on your…” She leaned across the parking brake and wiped under my eye. She placed her damp finger on my lips. “I like that you pay attention. You should tell me what you’ve seen.” She tapped the tip of my nose. “Give me a reason to stick around.”

Fifteen days after Dave left, Mona and I pulled into the driveway and there was the Skylark. Dave wrapped his arms around Mona; her brown legs, her bare feet flew, almost parallel to the ground. He looked me over. “Whaddayaknow, the runt’s grown.” Ruffled my hair. “Looks like you’ve been keeping an eye on her.”

“Yessir,” I replied, without a drop of sarcasm.

The day after his return, Dave invited me into the garage. It had an office, a bathroom, a couple of two-post and four-post lifts, the no-frills machinery needed to run a shop, and Dave’s one extravagance: a 1970 Plymouth Superbird. There when I arrived; there when I left.

“I found something. The perfect job.” Dave loved to hear himself talk. Once, on a half-day drive to a corn-riddled corner of southern Indiana, he was silent only when taking a drink or a piss. A Niagara Falls of opinions on Waco, women flying in combat, the World Trade Center, and Westley Allan Dodd. But when it came to stealing Dave spoke tersely, elliptically, like there were bugs planted everywhere, like he was in an action movie reciting someone else’s dialogue. He looked different, too. More expressive; less unyielding. More human.

“It’s big,” Dave said, an ambitious light in his eyes. “Wasn’t even looking.” He leaned in, lowered his voice. “Dropped in my lap.” He stroked the Plymouth’s rear wing; his eyes grew even brighter. “How you like them apples?”

I bounced on the balls of my feet. The words spilled out. “You want me to come with you.”

Human, movie Dave vanished. He smacked the trunk. Thunk. I stopped bouncing. “Quit your job?” Thunk. “Leave Mona alone?” Thunk.

“But—”

“Last thing I need’s you spacing in the middle of a job.”

Post-accident, criss-crossing my town’s bedraggled streets, I was continually surprised by what I found: a half-decent mural painted on the side of a half-vacant building; the bar signs between 3rd and 6th Streets, blinking like well-sequenced traffic lights; my neighbor’s little farm, where in pens next to the house he kept chickens, rabbits, miniature goats and a lone, spiral-horned sheep. Surly as fuck.

“Mark,” the bearded stranger mucking around the pens acknowledged, unsmiling.

I didn’t remember his name, but his mail would give me the answer. Before I touched the mailbox lid Bearded’s dogs—long legs, strong jaws—started up, and I reconciled myself to ignorance. My brain a bowl I’d dashed against a concrete floor. In one piece, but spider-webbed with cracks deep enough for matter to leak through.

In the garage, Dave shook his head at the idea I’d ride shotgun. “Actions have consequences.”

I nodded, face tight, and Dave reached into his pocket. He jangled a set of keys. “Let’s see if you can handle this. Saturday, Bruce Wannamaker wants to pick up his Silverado. Drive it out of here. Don’t let him in.” Dave cleared out the garage when he left town, no customers on his property when he wasn’t around, but he had to make an exception for this VIP and late-twentieth-century hanging judge, currently in Pennsylvania hunting squirrels.

Mona’s parents were dead, alcoholics, crack addicts, imprisoned, bigamists, polygamists, not her biological parents. They were skinheads, hippies, Mormons, Mennonites, would make Manson blush. They belonged to a Christian cult, Satanic cult, anti-government cult, sex cult, anti-technology cult whose members sacrificed goats and babies; lived in tepees, grew vegetables and danced naked under the moon; fucked little kids, watched little kids fuck; beat up anyone who wasn’t white, beat up only white people; camped out in Walmart parking lots, heaved garbage cans through capitalist pigs’ front windows. She was on her own after she escaped the basement, drove her evil parents crazy, was tossed by them into a dumpster while she slept.

“You’re a liar,” I said, kicking myself as I spoke. I’d broken the spell, was sure that Mona, inspired by her stories, would pull onto the shoulder and refuse to move until I exited the car. Far from home.

She only bared her teeth. “If you only knew...”

“Tell me. Trust me,” I begged.

She laughed, long and loud. “Next year. If I’m still around.” She made it sound like a threat.

I wanted to laugh, too. All those hours I’d watched Mona’s hands: drumming the steering wheel, rolling joints, making my lunch, darting like birds as she told story after story. Hours I’d cataloged her spidery fingers, broad nails, chapped knuckles. The brown spots on her forearms, three on the right and five on the left. The charms on her bracelet: red coffin, black moon, vampire bat, barbed wire twist, grinning skull, inverted cross. Key.

I’ve always been curious about other people, how they lived when they believed no one was watching, what their secrets were. Working with Dave only heightened my interest, as well as my understanding that most people didn’t hide their secrets particularly well.

I looked under Mona’s side of the bed, where Dave never stooped, and found a shoebox-sized box. Yellowing acrylic, fake tortoiseshell handles, a painted lid. A faceless girl, two braids and a calico sundress, sitting in a meadow. Shielded by an umbrella. No, a parasol. The latch was protected with flathead screws and a forty millimeter, three-pin lock, but anyone with a little experience could open it.

Back when I had potential, I was shown the basics of lock-picking. During my road-tripping with Dave, I managed to hang on to a couple of bump keys. Wiggle, wiggle. Thwap, thwap.

Before I touched anything I took a long look, memorizing what Mona’d placed where on the tarnished gold felt. More than seven hundred dollars in small, grubby bills. A weighty plastic bag of quarters. A boxcutter and box of razors. A pearl necklace with a silver bead set in between each dark side of the moon sphere. Three photographs, all featuring Mona. The first with a boy at the beach, arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting into the sun. Him five or six, Mona a couple years older. They had different skin tones but the same eye shape, hair color, nose. The second a few years later with a dog, brown-and-white, Spaniel-ish, sitting on the front steps of a white house with turquoise trim. The third looked recent. Mona’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, her dark under-eye circle eclipsed by a bruise, the white of her eye red with blood. A figure behind her, out-of-focus, face obscured by the camera. Mona’s tongue sticking out. I don’t care.

I wanted to spend more time with this picture but was distracted by the prize underneath. A Missouri driver’s license, a Kansas City address. A familiar ID photo linked to an unfamiliar name: Moira Sullivan. Black Irish. The phrase, meaningless, drifted through my head. Born 1978, two years before me. Which made Mona not twenty-one, but sixteen.

I stood before the bathroom mirror. I was inches taller. I examined the sparse hairs tufting my armpits, curling under my belly button. The zits punctuating my chin and forehead. (I’d started washing my face. It didn’t help.) I examined my points: elbows, ribs, collar bones, knees. Not as sharp as they used to be. I examined the new muscles—thighs, calves, shoulders, biceps—that work had created. I examined my dick. I touched, squeezed everything, as if it were the first time I’d seen myself. I found them acceptable, with potential.

My transformation from a strip of kindling into an average-sized log, the feeling I had that there was more within me, just waiting for the right moment to emerge, helped me ignore my urges—to tear apart my room, climb the train bridge and jump in the river, thump Dave back. To bang on the wall and tell Mona to shut up. Her cries of passion didn’t fool me.

One afternoon, Mona didn’t pick me up from the jobsite. Homeward bound, my bike slipped a chain. I trudged miles under a July sun, cars slowing but not stopping, feet blistering in my boots. Ample time to work myself into a fury.

“If she’s on the couch brushing her hair, I’ll strangle her with it. Doesn’t do a damn thing, can’t be counted on to. Lazy. Good-for-nothing. Bitch.”

I found Mona in my room. She’d closed the door, made my bed and laid down on it. Arms by her side, she stared at the ceiling. I’d never seen her so still. My rage subsided.

I was afraid to enter, to disturb Mona’s rest which wasn’t peace but a respite from reality. I’d been in her position. I leaned my head in the crack between the door and the jamb. My eyes fluttered shut.

“You stink.”

I jerked awake. Mona was still staring at the ceiling.

I waited.

“What? What!”

I shrugged, though I doubted she saw it.

Mona sighed, a gusty one that turned guttural, into a moan. She swung her legs off the bed and sat up, covered her face with her hands.

“Fine. Fine! Just quit staring. And change your damn shirt.”

For the first time, Mona let me drive the Mustang. She pushed her seat all the way back and stuck her feet out the window, hummed tunelessly as we drove to the lake. In summertime, access to the water was limited; most of the shore was privately owned, and the owners were in town. I parked at an informal boat launch, where the fishing was good but the view was mediocre. Left and right was swampy, shady shore. We could thread our way through the trees, follow a channel that connected this lake to one with a better view but no public parking. We stayed in the car, sprayed each other with mosquito repellent until any bug within a foot of us would drop to the ground, asphyxiated.

“Tell me something you’ve seen,” Mona demanded.

“Already have.”

1991. Dave and ten-year-old me were in Oneonta, watching the AAA versions of the Yankees play the Indians. There was a kid near us. Twenties, tall and skinny, blazing orange hair with matching freckles.

Dave pointed at him and laughed. “Richie Cunningham!” he hooted. “Richie fucking Cunningham!”

The kid smiled thinly. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

Dave sported a Yankees hat, Richie a satiny varsity jacket, “Indians” emblazoned across the front. Fine. They were into it. Dave was into it. Bronx born and raised, a regular in the stands since he could piss in a urinal. But not letting the results ruin his day. Mostly.

The Yankees were having a bad season. Another bad season. The best only a couple years away, but Richie didn’t know that and neither did Dave. The wannabe Yankees on the field, most barely needing to shave, dropped easy fly balls and walked in winning runs. Richie, belying his Wonderbread, Opie from Mayberry face, talked continuous shit. He spurted, gushed about Steinbrenner, Winfield, cougars and Mel Hall, about last year’s disgrace.

“Sixty-seven and ninety-five! Twenty-one games out of first!”

In the early days, I tried to jolly Dave along. This stranger, with my blood but not my memories, not my face. I’d win him over. Alice said it all the time: I was “a charmer.” But my father was a true Calvinist. I had to work for my keep and never expect a reward. It was all predetermined, whether I was damned or saved.

“Losing a no hitter! Didn’t know that was possible,” Richie chortled.

So I sat back and let it happen. I’d like to say without a flinch, but that came later.

Dave appeared relaxed, friendly. I watched his tight hands, his pulsing veins.

In the parking lot, Dave took Richie down with one punch. Timberrrr! Followed by three swift, steel-toed kicks: shriek-moan, thud, crack. He strolled to the car: unhurried, unworried. I skittered two steps in front of him. Wanting to run, knowing I shouldn’t.

The way I told Mona the story, of course, I was the one punching, kicking, grinning.

“You’re holding out on me, I can tell,” she said.

“No. How?”

“Your eyes? Smug. Your hands? Nervous. Your mouth? A goldfish trying to think.” She sucked her cheeks into a fish face, made kissy noises as she opened and closed her mouth, released it with a mwah! “You wanna tell me something but don’t have the balls.”

“Bullshit.” Attempting to muster swagger, assembling only sulkiness. I saw myself as stone-faced and disaffected, potentially dangerous. Mona let me know I was eager, lonely, nervous. A child.

“Tell me what you’ve seen or we’re going home.”

The fire I stoked as I pushed my bike along the side of the road, banked when I saw Mona on my bed, burst into flames. I made my own fish face, my own mwah!

“Whatever you say, Moira.”

Mona’s reaction was better than I anticipated. For a long moment she was stunned. Speechless.

She slapped me. Hard, loud, red.

I slapped her back, a flare of relief when her cheek burned bright.

With a shriek, Mona threw herself at me, elbow knocking against the steering wheel, squeezing another shriek out of her that she took out on my ears. She hooked her fingers behind them; squashed, yanked, and mashed them. She straddled me and grabbed my hair. I yelped, bit the inside of my cheek. I wriggled and bucked, seized Mona’s arms and shoved her away. She hung on like a pit bull. Lowered her head, bit my neck, and didn’t let go.

I stopped moving. I could smell her: DEET, weed, sweat, corn syrup. I could feel her: not just her teeth and fingernails, but her hot breath and dry lips, the soft of her thighs, breasts, ass. The heat inside me turned syrupy, languid. I forgot that I was stronger than Mona. I wanted her to bite down harder. I wanted to lick the mosquito repellent from her arms.

She must have felt me, hard under her.

She removed her mouth, shook my head between her fists. “Are you going to tell?”

“Course not!”

She shifted back into her seat. Gave me a serious look that was a thinly veiled gloat. She looked at my crotch and, pointedly, out the window. Whistled as she wrapped a strand of hair round her finger.

“I could totally beat you up,” I insisted.

“Sure.”

“Guys are stronger than girls.”

“Go ahead,” Mona said. She turned and blew me a kiss.

“I will.”

“I know.”

“One day, when you don’t expect it.” I pictured it. My fingers squeezing her throat. Her eyes blooming with bruises. Her cheekbone cracking, lake ice under a spring sun.

Mona didn’t want to hear that Dave was a cautious thief, that at the end of the day, all jobs are just that. You can do them well, or badly. In Dave’s case, doing his job well meant blandness. Avoiding attention was insufficient; when he was on the road, his goal was to avoid being seen. “Single men attract attention. Family men blend.” I was more prop than apprentice.

So I told Mona stories about our dramatic getaways. The time I had to feed a Doberman a spiked pile of raw hamburger, crawl down a chimney, avoid being skewered by a homeowner with a samurai sword. The time I came crying out of the bushes when the police showed up, pretending I was lost and little, forgotten where I lived, was driven to the police station and there was Dave. The time I jumped out of the closet, gave the old lady living there a heart attack while she was opening her safe, enabling me to scoop up stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills that’d left circulation decades earlier.

“Where’s all the money?”

“Not home, that’s for sure.”

“All your watching, you haven’t seen where Dave stashes it?”

“He likes his money way more than he likes me.”

Mona looked at me, searchingly. I looked back at her, steadily.

“If you found it?” she asked.

“I’d leave.”

“Alone?”

“Why? You wanna come with?”

“No,” she said, but only after a beat, a hesitation.

“All your bitching and moaning. Turns out you like it here.”

“You don’t understand,” Mona said, unusually serious. “It’s tough being on your own.”

“You’d be with me, though,” I replied, equally serious.

She laughed, short and sharp, without humor. “You and me? That’d make two of us alone. Better to stay with the asshole I know than have to take care of you, only to end up with a bigger asshole who’d never let you stick around. Besides”—she flipped her hair—“I’ve got Dave wrapped around my finger. I know what to do, when he gets in a mood.”

This time, I let myself laugh. Mona was offended.

“What?!”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

I didn’t turn away, though I couldn’t wipe the smug from my face. Mona was right. I was a liar.

Dave tore his photograph into a hundred pieces, offered me, in our years together, a fistful of fragments to make of what I could. New York City, a tour in Vietnam, Long Beach and Alice. Was his life his idea, something he moved towards deliberately? Did someone see what he was good for, set him on his path? Did he wake up one September morning, a decade had passed, and the only way through was forward?

No answers to these questions. No answers to other questions. Why did Alice give me up? Why did I survive my accident? Why did Dave keep me? Why did Mona put herself in Dave’s line of sight? When could I kiss her? When would she kiss me?

Sick of not having answers to any of these questions, hours after Dave left to complete his big score, I took the keys he’d given me, breathed deep, and unlocked the garage. Even as I reminded myself that Dave was far away, that Mona would be gone for hours and the neighbors were asleep, I kept the lights off, relying on a flashlight, beam muffled with a T-shirt.

The dark slowed me down, forced me to think. The garage office was locked. Unlikely, Dave hated to be obvious, but. Thoroughness. Bump, bump, thwap, thwap, and I was in. Nothing. I eased the door shut and walked along the garage walls, step step step, sweeping the beam from top to bottom, touching, probing. Next, the floor. It didn’t make sense for it to be in the front, where traffic was high. Nevertheless, I examined every inch. Under Judge Wannamaker's Silverado; under tires, lifts, compressors; under cabinets, inside them too. Until all that remained was the Superbird. Nothing in the trunk, under the seats, under the hood.

Face to the floor, I wriggled forward, groped, swept my palm along the floor and finally, yes, there, smack in the middle, I felt the seams of a concrete panel. Underneath it, I knew I’d find the safe.

I remembered what Dave told me in the early days, as he was giving me a tour of the garage, putting me in my place. “Took forever, but I wanted it done right. Every last inch has my fingerprints on it. Even poured the concrete. Let it rain. The floor’s tighter than a nun’s cunt.”

Discovering Mona’s secret, sharing that knowledge with her, puffed me up. I decided she now considered me her equal, cackle-snorted with me rather than at me. She could finally let herself like me as much as I liked her. I focused on turning her ready amusement and occasional delight, her brief touches, into something more tangible: gratitude, desire.

On some afternoons there were no words, no sounds other than the thrum of the engine, the zip-splat of bugs on the windshield, the crunch of Mona’s teeth on her butterscotch candies. The sun shone—as steadily as the oxygen coursing through my arteries—on my arm, cheek, leg. The silence was a blanket, the perfect weight and heat. We drove past decaying homes, dozing livestock, beer-liquor-cigarettes-lotto shops, flowing water, trees and more trees. We passed through places too small to be towns; they were villages, hamlets really, made up of a handful of streets, a couple of bars, a church and a diner. We shared a torn vinyl banquette. Legs pressed together, we shared straws and plates. Mona flirted with the waitress, graciously accepted the lone customer’s attention while I tried to seem unbothered. We pulled over when we saw a meadow, a perfect shade tree. “Open your mouth,” Mona said, and blew smoke into it. She rested her head on my shoulder: giggled, giggled, fell over. Each day, night came earlier. I spent longer with my head against the passenger window, watching the sky darken, counting the days until school started, until Dave returned. Possibly, if the work was as fruitful as he anticipated, for good.

I remember all of it.

Why was Mona on her own? A father, a stepfather, an uncle, a boyfriend of her mother, aunt, sister, grandmother. Her own boyfriend. All of the above. You didn’t end up in her situation unless something unbearable had happened, far worse than anything I’d dealt with. Even as I begged her for details, I didn’t want to know. The facts would only tarnish her stories, my vision of her.

Even when she sat, Mona was in motion: tapping, bouncing, wiggling, wriggling. At the most insignificant sight—roadkill, a car with an out-of-state license plate, a Jesus ad, an oversized American flag hanging limply from a tiny house—she’d decelerate. Crane her neck, twist her torso, her whole body, to get a better look. As August waned and Dave promised he'd be back “real soon,” Mona grew increasingly restless. She demanded stories about the ocean, the desert, big cities, real mountains. Spaces to get lost in, spaces where you could climb high, sink low. Poised for flight, and my role to help her forget she’d chained herself in place.

But during the last story I told Mona, she was almost motionless. As I spoke, she reached across the gear shift. I grabbed on tight. She rubbed the tendon by my wrist, urging me not to stop. I told Mona the story as a plea: to see me as someone to be trusted. As a dare: top this. Egged on by her rapt attention, her humid fingers, I told her the story as a confession: this is for you.

That day Mona kissed me, a real kiss. We crawled into the back seat and clung to each other. As I explained what the house would look like, the city would be like, what we’d do, who we’d be, I traced her scars until I raised goosebumps.

When I said she’d waitress, she corrected me. “I’ll be in a bakery making cupcakes, birthday cakes.”

“Cookies. Chocolate chip.”

“Peanut butter. Oatmeal raisin. My dad taught me to cook. He was good.”

What was the story? I can only summarize. Its beauty was in its spontaneity. It took the form of a fairy tale. Even as I spoke, I wanted distance between myself and the words. Two kids who, when the evil father was out of the house, snuck into the stable and dug up the floor where he’d hidden his gold and jewels. Two kids who took the bad man’s ill-gotten gains, obtained by robbing wagon trains snailing through mountain passes. Who freed the horses, burned down the stable and hopped a train headed west. The money well-hidden, no one the wiser, until they met the ocean and there they stopped, there they lived. No one the wiser.

The last time I saw Mona she was lying in the driveway. Her legs were pockmarked with gravel, threaded with blood. Dave had dragged her out of the house by her hair. She’d snuck into the garage, searching for the safe. Not nearly as careful as I was.

The last time I saw Dave, Mona was screaming it was my idea. I’d threatened her, told her I’d lie to Dave, tell him she was cheating unless she found his money and gave it to me, so I could run away.

She spoke with utter sincerity. Her voice trembled and throbbed; the finger she pointed at me was steady. Righteous.

I believed what she said. I still do.