Marjorie knows it’s all an act. A cowardly one.

A truly brave woman would have allowed her husband to open up to them on that road. To explain why he’d done the things he’d done. A brave woman engages the darkness within the man she loves. Learns where it ends and begins and learns how together they can learn the dance steps needed to keep it in submission. And Marjorie would have helped, would have shouldered the entire burden herself if her mother had allowed.

If you can’t be loyal and true to your family, you can’t be loyal to anyone or anything.

But you can’t count on your friends, apparently. Marjorie learns that lesson a year after her father goes to jail, thanks to Brenda White.

Sammy Jo Peyton, Clara Diamond, Daisy Hufstedler—they all hang in with her for a while, but eventually they give up because Marjorie doesn’t want to go for cheeseburgers and talk to boys anymore because everyone still looks at her funny, even if they do fall all over themselves treating her like a victim and not the guilty party.

But Brenda stays true for a little longer, mainly because she loves the movies as much as Marjorie does. Especially the westerns. And so, when it turns out the only thing left that brings Marjorie any joy is buying double- and triple-bill tickets at the local picture show and disappearing into the fantasy on-screen, Brenda’s content to sit next to her, even while her mind is far away. It makes sense, really. Brenda’s always been a quiet girl, as quiet as Marjorie has become after her father’s arrest. Together they go on long walks and kick rocks and watch sunsets. They have the occasional conversation about strange things, like whether snakes have dreams when they sleep during the winter, but for the most part they don’t have to dress it all up with a bunch of words.

Maybe that’s why she tells Brenda more than she should. Tells her that she’s saving up money for bus fare to visit her daddy in Huntsville. There are no big prisons in West Texas in those days, so it’s a trip across the state, but she’s determined to make it. Alone. Brenda nods as if she understands, but apparently she doesn’t, because on the day Lubbock changes forever, Marjorie arrives home from an evening spent in the library to find her mother red-faced and pacing in the living room, demanding every last penny her daughter has saved up to visit her father in jail.

She is never to see her father again, her mother tells her, not even with her own money. Her father has refused to see her, and if Marjorie insists on going against that God-given blessing, then she’s courting darkness. That’s how she puts it. Courting darkness. Marjorie is to give her mother the money until this crazy instinct passes, and her mother will give it back once she’s confident her daughter’s head is back to rights.

The weather outside has turned downright malevolent; Marjorie had run the last few blocks home with her hand shielding her face from the leaves and dirt turned to shrapnel in the wind. Now, the walls of the house shake in a way that echoes the building rage in both women’s souls. The fusillade of hail pelting the roof tells Marjorie she and her mother will be trapped together for the duration of this moment of reckoning, however long it takes to play out.

When Marjorie refuses to hand over a dime, her mother whacks her so hard across the face, she loses her balance and stumbles into the edge of the kitchen table. It’s not the strike of an angry parent. It’s not a blow caused by lost patience. It’s the kind of violence you unleash in a panic against an intruder, containing the force reserved for an insect or a rodent you’ve found in the kitchen.

Marjorie’s face sings with multi-octave pain, her vision blurs. There’s no hysterical apology. Instead, her mother unleashes a torrent of accusations to rival the sound of hail pounding against the roof, and that’s when Marjorie knows this moment might be the end for whatever still holds them together.

And maybe, she thinks through the pain, that’s not such a bad thing.

23

Amarillo, Texas

Marjorie can tell they’re tweakers when she’s within a few paces of the barn.

Sure, they’ve used bolt cutters to snap the padlock from the door, but the car they’ve parked a few feet away is a shitbird on wheels, a decades-old El Dorado beat to hell by both time and bad maintenance. Some old gearhead might be able to restore it to something worth parading at a vintage car show, but only after they spend days scraping the barnacles of rust from its doors.

Tweakers, for sure. High and stupid and messy as all hell. Any thieves worth their salt would at least keep their mouths shut as they rooted through the barn’s contents, but from outside the half-open door, she can hear the little bastards whispering up a storm, giggling now and then like mad hyenas.

She hasn’t seen the car around town, and she’s a good thirty-minute drive from anything you might call civilization. Marjorie doubts they’ve gone to the trouble of actually casing the place. Probably just cruising the dry open country outside Amarillo looking for a place to tweak and do strange sex things and God knows what else.

Since she’d fallen asleep with most of the lights off, who knows if they could even make out the house at all?

She kicks the door open with one foot, sees the two flashlight beams inside do a jiggly dance in response, beams bouncing over the expanse of tarp and plywood she and the boys placed over the pits they dug last year. Marjorie slides the pump on her shotgun, emitting that telltale sign capable of freezing anyone’s blood, she’s sure.

One of them—a boy, it sounds like—lets out a frightened cry. She steps inside. There’s an electric lantern right inside the door. Without lowering the gun, she reaches down, flicks it on. When the kids before her see the massive shotgun in her dual grip, their hands go up and they start shaking their heads with mad energy. She was right. Tweakers, for sure, as filthy as if they’d clawed their way up and out of the mud lining the creek bed a little ways behind the barn. But they’re young. Much younger than she expected, and this gives her a bit of pause. Teenagers at the most.

But another few minutes and they might have assumed the plank flooring covered up something truly valuable, or they might have started messing with the concrete mixer and the coil of the pump’s tube resting in the corner like a sleeping anaconda. There’s nothing for them to steal, and they should have realized that right away, but they stuck around and that was stupid. Real stupid.

One of them—the girl—starts to panic, blubbering, raised hands trembling. Marjorie’s sure the girl’s trying to muster a defense of herself, but her brains are so scrambled she can’t quite make words. She sounds like a mewling bird.

Kids, Marjorie thinks, just kids, both of them. The car’s way older than they are, which means it’s stolen.

She was a kid once. Before her father was so cruelly taken from her.

But even amid that terrible loss, she never allowed herself to become a broken-down thing like this. She kept her focus. Made choices. Determined her fate. Read the signs and took the opportunities presented her.

When the boy starts talking, he sounds just as bad as the girl, but the words are starting to make sense, like the lyrics of a familiar song being played just far enough from you that when in the first minute after you notice it, all you can hear is the bass line.

“Please let us go . . . please, please . . . let us go. Please let us go. Please.”