This was all true except for the very last part. In actuality, my father-in-law (Alan) came on day five to help us throw everything into boxes, and to keep me from throwing choppers at Victor, who’d spent all four days “packing” the garage, which I was pretty sure contained absolutely nothing of value, and which I would have sold for twenty dollars on Craigslist if Victor had died. I’m not entirely sure why a man would need two cabinets filled with tools, when I’ve been able to make it through thirty-five years of life with just duct tape and one screwdriver. Victor says it’s because “people don’t rebuild carburetors with duct tape,” but I’m pretty sure that Victor just doesn’t know how versatile duct tape is.
After we’d packed up the moving van, we began our long ride to our new home. A few minutes into the drive, Alan cleared his throat and self-consciously pulled a baggie out of his front pocket. “Oh. By the way. I found some . . . uh . . . crack, maybe?” he said as he hesitantly handed me the Ziploc bag of crack. My first thought was that it was strange that my very conservative father-in-law would offer me crack, and I wondered whether this was some sort of test. My second thought was that although I’d never seen crack before, I assumed it was expensive, and this seemed to be a lot of crack to have at one time. Unless possibly he was selling it, which seemed strange, since Alan was a very successful businessman. Still, I was aware that he’d given up a whole day to come help us, so I tried to be nonjudgmental as I struggled to find a polite way of turning him down, but then I recognized my handwriting on the baggie. I realized with relief that Alan must have found the bag when he was packing and was nice enough to bring it along for the ride. I laughed and explained, “Oh, this is not my crack. It’s Hailey’s,” and he looked a bit more nauseated, and then I explained that what I really meant was that it was Hailey’s and that it was not crack. It was a powder you can buy that explodes into fake snow when you add water. I explained that Hailey played with it every winter, since we didn’t get real snow in Texas, and it was reusable but that when it dehydrates it looks like crack. I threw a small crack rock into an almost empty water bottle, and it instantly filled with snow, and Alan sighed with relief. It was a little insulting that he’d found crack and automatically assumed it was mine, but I considered everyone else who lived in the house and instead gave him credit for knowing me so well.
Soon after we moved in, I started researching the history of the area and found that we now lived on the edge of “The Devil’s Backbone,” one of the most haunted stretches of land in Texas. I’ve always been fascinated with ghost stories, so it didn’t bother me until a neighbor came over and told me about the bodies buried down the road from us. “The who buried where?” I asked her. Turns out a family had been buried in what was then their backyard, but the wilderness had grown up around it, and now the graves were all but lost. It bothered me. Not that there was an impromptu cemetery down the road (dead neighbors make quiet neighbors . . . I think Robert Frost said that), but that there was a lost graveyard in our subdivision that no one could find. Had it been built over? Were the graves fresh? I’d been happy that we were so far out in the country and wouldn’t be attacked by the hordes of overpopulated city zombies, but it concerned me that if the zombie apocalypse came we might have homemade zombies planted nearby, and we had no idea which direction they might come from. I was concerned. So was Victor, who said he’d appreciate it if I’d stop talking about the zombie apocalypse in front of our neighbors. “She deserves to know,” I retorted, and I told Victor that we needed to find these graves, because I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew where they were.
“No,” he said firmly. “We’re not going traipsing around the woods, looking for bodies in the unlikely event that there is a zombie apocalypse.”
“CONSTANT VIGILANCE,” I (may have) screamed. “I’m doing this for all of us, asshole.” And I was. We had a zombie garden somewhere nearby, and I wanted to be sure that it was old enough that the zombies would be no threat. We fought about it for a few days, until finally he agreed to find out where the graves were, probably because he finally realized that there are some unpleasant things the protector of the house is responsible for. Or possibly because I continually woke him up every three hours to ask whether he heard something on the back porch that sounded “hungry and shuffling.”
Victor found a local guy who claimed to know where the graves were, and he said to just take the road at the end of the street. Except that there wasn’t a road at the end of the street. I pointed at two overgrown tracks in the grass. “I think that’s what he’s talking about.”
“That’s not a road,” Victor said dismissively, but there was nothing else there.