“You’ll eat soon, Michaela,” I say. “Pass her here, Jojo.”
Jojo unbuckles her from the seat, and he pushes her forward. Her hair’s knotted in the back, curls worn fuzzy from the rub of her car seat. I smooth the hair up, trying to tame it into a puff on the top of her head, but she shakes and cries for a potato chip again. I dig in my purse. There’s nothing in the bottom but change and one peppermint I took from the bar. I unwrap it and give it to Michaela, and she sucks and quiets. The car smells like mint and her hair, sweet as sugar. Michael slows to cross the railroad tracks, and just as he does, a tusked wild hog, big as two men and covered in black fur, darts from the woods and sprints across the road, as light on his hooves as a child. Michael swerves a little, and I clutch Michaela but I can’t hold her and she flies forward, hitting her head on the dashboard. Michael swerves off the road and stops. Michaela bounces and slides down on my feet, and she is quiet.
“Michaela,” I say. I grab her under her armpits and drag her up, see a purple knot weeping red on her forehead. She’s alive, because her eyes are open and she’s hitching to cry, her breath stuttering in her throat. She wails.
“Kayla!” Jojo says.
“Jojo!” Michaela puts her forearms into my collarbones, pushing away from me, wanting Jojo again. The headlights vanish into the darkness along with the monstrous pig and suddenly I feel boneless, loose as a jellyfish, and I don’t have the strength to fight her.
“Shhhh,” I say, but even as my mouth is trying to comfort her, I hand her over the backseat, and she’s in Jojo’s arms. He’s patting her back as her arms settle around his neck. Michael and I turn to each other and I frown. We face forward, looking at the mist obscuring the windshield.
“Jojo, buckle her in.” I say this without turning to look at him, because I don’t want to see his face, afraid I might see the hard planes of Pop in his expression: judgment. Or worse, the soft quiver of Mama’s pity.
“You sure?” Michael’s shaken: I can tell by the way he grips the steering wheel and then lets go, grips and lets go, as if he’s testing his reflexes, gauging the nimbleness of his fingers. One bug crackles and hits the windshield, drunk in the lights. And then another.
“You want to go,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go.”
There is no radio, no talk. Just the growl and pull of the car, the gravel ground under the tires, gatherings of frogs singing in hisses and croaks from ponds in woods and some perfect circles dug into yards. Michael’s parents’ house is different at night, and it’s been so many years since I’ve been there in the dark that it is a hazy memory, even as I look at it: long, straight gravel driveway, yellow in the moonlight, leading to the house through the fields; the gravel shimmers, an after-light left by a sparkler through night air. There are two lit windows, one at each end of the house. Michael cuts the lights so the car creeps and crunches down the driveway, the roll of the rocks under the tires sounding little pops. We park next to Big Joseph’s pickup truck and a blue car with a short hood, boxy body and back. A rosary hangs from the rearview mirror. I ease the car door open, and I suddenly need to pee, desperately. I don’t want to be here. Michael holds out his hand, and I want to climb back in the car, slam the door, drive off with the kids, who are still sitting in the backseat. A dog barks in the distance.
“Come on,” Michael says.
“Let’s go,” I tell Jojo. He gets out of the car and stands in the dark. He is as tall as me, maybe a little taller, and I can see him tall as Pop in two or three years. He hoists Michaela up and holds her in front of his chest: her back, his shield. Michaela is touching her forehead, which shows a dark constellation of blood, and asking Jojo questions.
“Mam?” she asks. “Pop? Mam? Pop?”
“No,” Jojo says. “These new people.”
But he doesn’t say who they are, and I want to answer her question, want to be her mother, want to say: Your other grandma or grandpa, your other family, your other Mam and Pop. But I don’t know what to say, how to explain, so I say nothing and let Michael answer her questions. But he offers nothing, either: he walks up the deck steps to the front porch and the door, pulls the screen door open, and knocks: two sure knocks, hard as a horse’s hooves on asphalt. I follow, and Jojo’s dragging feet purr through the gravel in the dark. Michael walks down the steps, a white ghost in the dark; grabs my hand; and pulls me up to stand next to him at the door.
Michael knocks again, and I hear movement in the house. Jojo hears like an animal and takes a step back toward the car.
“Come on, Jojo,” Michael says.
The door opens and there is light so bright I look down at my feet, Michael’s hand hard as metal in mine, gripping so tight I am sure my fingers are purple and white, but I see him, see Big Joseph, wearing overalls and a too-tight T-shirt, his peppered beard, his fleshy arms, all of it too much in the yellow spill. I step back. Michael pulls.
“Daddy,” he says.
“Son,” Big Joseph says. It is only the second time I’ve heard him speak in person, and his voice surprises me with how high it is, so different from the rest of him, which seems so rooted, so close to the earth, so low. The first time was in the courtroom, but he didn’t mean anything to me then, beyond being the uncle of the boy who shot my brother.
“We here,” Michael says. He lifts our clenched hands. Big Joseph lists, an old oak in a bad wind, but does not move, does not step back, does not say: Come in. In the dark behind us, Michaela cries.
“Eat,” she says. “I eat, Jojo!”
There are footsteps. Not as heavy as Big Joseph’s, but a steady, solid thumping, and even though I know it’s his mother, know it’s Maggie, I still flinch when I hear her smoker’s voice: deep and gravelly. She yanks open the door and she looks like a rabbit: her robe like a cream fur, her house slippers like white paws. I’ve seen her twice outside of this house, know that her body underneath is rabbit, too: the thin arms and legs, the round ball of her stomach.
“Cheese, Jojo!” Michaela screams.
“You heard the child, Joseph,” she says. A spasm makes her face twitch, and then it is still. Her hair is a red cap, her eyes unfathomably dark. “Time for supper.”
“We already ate,” Big Joseph wheezes.
Michaela mewls.
“And she ain’t,” Maggie says.
“You know they ain’t welcome in this house.”