“I don’t know. She asked weird questions, like why you’d been cooking and not Dani, and if we went to the hospital. She said it wasn’t good, us being on our own so much, but I said Dad was coming home soon.” Ingrid could be nosy, and she had no problem sharing your personal business with anyone who would listen. She’d more than likely already told a few people that we were still alone. People who might decide to be neighborly and check on us.
Courtney looked at Dani. “We should just get out of here.”
Dani thought it over, taking so long I wanted to shout at her, but the more I pushed, the longer she’d take. She liked to look at all sides of stuff, weighing the options, but I thought she should listen to her guts more. I agreed with Courtney, but if I told Dani what I thought, she’d just tell me to shut up.
“If we split right after those gunshots, they’re going to wonder,” she finally said. “Maybe even send the cops after us. Let’s just hold tight for now.”
*
When we were finished eating, we ripped up the linoleum in the bathroom, which had already been peeling in places. We didn’t know what to do with it, so we shoved it into the shed until we could figure something out. We dug the bullet out of the wall—it had lodged in one of the beams—then patched the hole with some drywall putty we also found in the shed. We repainted the whole bathroom and the plywood floor with some old paint Dad had stolen from one of his buddies.
Around midnight we took Dad’s truck to the quarry, sticking to the back road. Dani drove, wearing one of Dad’s cowboy hats and a big coat, making her look bulkier in case anyone passed us. Courtney and I stayed low on the passenger side. At the quarry we drove around, checking that no one else was out there for a late swim. It was quiet. We went to one of the highest spots, put the truck in neutral, and pushed it over the edge. It didn’t sink right away.
“Shit! It’s not going down,” I said. “We should’ve opened the windows.”
“Wait,” Dani said. Finally it started to move, sinking below the surface. Bubbles rose.
“What if someone sees it? Like swimming down or something,” I said.
“They won’t,” Dani said. But she didn’t meet my eyes.
*
We decided to ditch the bleached rags and ripped-up linoleum at a neighbor’s. The man had more junk in his yard than our father, and stacks of building debris behind one of his shops—Courtney had fooled around with his son and remembered him saying the stuff had been there for decades. Best case, if he ever did clean up, it would get hauled to the garbage dump for us.
We drove Dani’s truck, our cargo under some other garbage, and parked near the bottom of his fields, where he brought the tractor through, turning our headlights off and coasting in. We couldn’t get too close—he might hear us up at the house—so we followed the tractor road on foot, each of us carrying an armload, the moon lighting our way. Courtney tripped and dropped her load with a thump.
We all froze, waiting to hear if anyone had noticed. The night was still.
We spread the garbage among the plywood, drywall, and scrap metal, carefully placing the sheets of linoleum between everything, trying to make sure it was at the back of the piles. It was hard work because we had to move some of the scrap, which was heavy, and we were trying to be quiet so we had to move slowly, our muscles screaming with tension. We didn’t know what to do with the bag of rags. Courtney and Dani argued in hushed whispers—Courtney thought we should just bury them, but Dani said an animal might be attracted to the blood and dig them back up. Finally we shoved them into an oil drum, then ran down the tractor road to the truck, my sister’s bodies dark shadows in front of me.
*
Back at home, we lit the last of Dad’s cigarettes and talked about what we should do.
“We could get jobs,” Courtney said.
“Doing what?” I said. “And who would hire us?”
There weren’t many opportunities in this town for three teenage girls, just farm work and maybe waitressing or working at the grocery store.
“You guys are missing the point,” Dani said. “They won’t let us stay here without Dad—people, his boss and his friends, are going to start looking for him. If we say he skipped out on us again, they’ll put us in foster care.”
“You’re almost eighteen, maybe they’ll let you keep us,” I said.
“I’d have to show that I could support you.”
“Walter and Ingrid might let us stay if we kept working on the ranch.”
“It’s not enough money and Dad’s already behind,” Dani said.
“We could go on welfare,” I said. “Or maybe Corey’s parents would let us stay there?” Dani was pretty close to her boyfriend’s family and they were nice.
“They don’t have room,” she said. “And we can’t stay anyway. We don’t know if Dad stopped somewhere before he came home. Someone might’ve seen him in town.”
“Should we leave tonight?” Courtney said.
“No,” Dani said. “It’ll look like we didn’t give him a chance to come home, like we know something.” The way she said it told me she’d been thinking about this for a while. “In a few days we have to say that he’s taken off again, and we’re going to stay with family.”