“It should be coming up…”
Summer rolled her eyes but scanned the desert for it, anyway.
“Does it look like a prison?” She’d seen them on the Lifetime movies her mother watched: gray places with bars over the windows and people dressed in orange.
“Don’t think of it like a prison,” her mother said. “He’s renovated the inside with the money his adoptive mother left him.” She was checking her reflection in the rearview mirror. “It’s more like living in an apartment building. They have a vegetable garden, an apricot orchard and goats and chickens. There’s a cafeteria where everyone has their meals together.”
“He”： her mother’s friend—the help-promiser. “Are the goats and chickens in prison, or to be eaten by the prisoners?” She’d meant for it to be funny, but by the look on Mama’s face, she’d said the wrong thing again—the thing her dad would have said. Summer could taste the dust from outside coating her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said quickly, not wanting to ruin the mood. “Can I have a sip of that water?”
The plastic water bottle crackled when Summer took it from her mother’s hand. She was lifting the bottle to her lips when an odd shape rose out of the desert, on her right.
“Look, is that it?” She pointed out the window at the pale building that rose out of the dirt like a squat sandcastle. A single road led down to the building. To reach it, they would have to pass through a gate. The gate was an ugly, solid, metal thing; Summer resented that she couldn’t see through it, but now someone was stepping out of the little shack to their left and she switched her attention to the thickset woman wearing a guard’s uniform.
Her mama said a bad word, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel like she did when she was nervous. “Summer, sit back,” she said.
The woman was around her mom’s age, and she had crunchy-looking blond hair that zigzagged out from her head like electrified noodles.
Noodles took a step toward the car, scanning the road behind them like she was waiting for an ambush or something.
“Name?” This one word, spoken through her teeth, with no smile to accompany it.
“Lorraine,” her mama said to the woman. She said it in the nice voice she reserved for Summer’s teachers. The woman didn’t react to the name or her mama’s friendly tone. She didn’t check a list or smile; she stared straight at Mama—stuck her jaw out at her, even. And then, in a less friendly voice, she heard her mama add, “Taured is expecting us.”
Bending at the waist, like she hadn’t heard, Noodles scanned the interior of the car for…what? Summer scanned along with her, looking for a problem. There was none. They both seemed to come to this conclusion at the same time. “Pop the trunk.” The woman’s voice was deep and impatient.
It came as an order, not a request. Summer felt rather than saw her mama tense. Sometimes she thought she could hear her mother when no one else could, feel her feelings, and she couldn’t really explain that to anyone, because it was weird. The trunk unlatched and she heard things being moved around. A few seconds later, the woman reemerged next to the driver’s-side window. She nodded to Summer in the back seat and stepped into the shed, picking up a walkie-talkie. She turned her back to them when she made the call, and Summer watched her walk back into the little shed, nod and press a button to open the gate. The two solid metal doors opened to reveal a long stretch of road.
Mama let go of the brake and the car bounced through the gate. Summer spun her head around, gripping the back of the seat with both her hands to stare out of the back window at Noodles. She was watching them.
“What a nutjob,” she said, turning back to face the front.
“Don’t say things like that. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Daddy would have thought she was.”
“Enough!” Lorraine’s voice was angry, and her eyes were worse; Summer looked away, at the sandcastle, instead. The closer they got, the less interesting it looked. She wanted to go home.
“Remember what I told you,” Mama said.
“You’ve told me a lot of things.” She could feel her mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but she refused to meet them. Instead, she focused her gaze outside the window and on the bumping of the car as it rolled over the battered road. The closer they got, the more disappointing the scene: dirt, more dirt and then a dusty parking lot holding eight crappy cars.