The waiter did not cower. “Tell me something. You in trouble? Because you look like you might be. What is it you asked back in my diner not five minutes ago? Right, how much food you could get for three dollars. The answer is, besides with me, none, so get in the truck.”
Feral tugged at Vern’s arm in pain, and Vern remembered to loosen her grip so as not to crush his little fingers. Howling could endure her bruising grips better, but she allowed his hand some give, too. “I’ve taken care of myself for a long time. I don’t need your help.”
The woman sighed, fingers fidgety. She looked like she wanted to smoke but in the last six months, regretfully, had quit. “Then why did you come here? To shoot the shit?”
Vern stood still, lips pinched shut.
“No wonder Lucy liked you so much. Birds of a goddamn feather,” said the woman, and removed a Zippo lighter from her pocket. She opened the brass lid, flicked the flint wheel, and watched the flame pop up from the metal eyelet like a jack-in-the-box.
Beside Vern, Feral was going wild, pulling toward what to him must have surely seemed an object of sorcery. “Mam! Mam!” he whispered excitedly. Howling, too, was interested, but had maintained his composure.
But the fire held no interest for Vern when considered against the woman’s words. Lucy. That name was a spell. Once it was spoken, every alert in Vern’s body signaled at once. It’d be maudlin and overly simple to call Lucy her North Star, her beacon. More accurately, she was Vern’s trigger.
“You know Lucy?” she asked.
The woman crossed her arms over her chest and closed the Zippo. “The name’s Bridget, but a lot of folks call me Auntie. Are you going to get in now or what?”
Vern huffed but opened the door with a yank, lifting Howl ing and Feral inside. The truck was an old-style pickup with no back seat, rips in the upholstery. Vern crawled over the children so she would be the one forced flush against Bridget.
“You been followed?” asked Bridget.
Vern bristled at the suggestion that she’d been heedless enough to pick up a tail, but it wasn’t an impossibility. Sherman’s power was bolstered by a cabal Vern didn’t yet fully comprehend. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Bridget grunted. “You never know with Cainland,” she said.
“How did you know that I was me?” asked Vern.
Bridget reached into the back pocket of her overalls and pulled out a brown wallet. She flicked it open and handed it to Vern. Tucked under cloudy plastic casing was a photo. Vern brought it toward her face, angling her head until she found the right focal point for her wobbling eyes.
It was a cut-up Polaroid of Lucy and Vern on the morning of an Ascension, their hands clutching and their faces as somber and stiff as gravestones. Sherman didn’t allow photography on the compound, but he took pictures of everyone on the mornings of their rebirths so that the punished could look at the images of their old selves and burn them. Lucy’s mother, or Lucy herself, must’ve stolen this from Sherman’s office.
Vern circled her thumb over the two girls in the picture. They were strangers now to Vern, these fresh-faced innocents. Ghosts.
“Here, Mam,” said Feral, holding up his arm to her.
“What?”
“You can use my sleeve if you want,” he said, worming his hand inside to create a loose piece of fabric. “For your tears.”
Vern handed the wallet back to Bridget and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Thank you, Feral, but I’m fine,” she said.
“Are you, Vern?” asked Bridget.
Vern squeezed her eyes shut as a headache teased at her temples. “It was just weird seeing that.” Looking at old photos of yourself was like seeing a picture of your own dead body.
“No, I mean physically, are you all right? You look … shaky.”
Vern sucked snot into her nose and dried off what remained of the fallen tears with the sleeve of her coat. “Been better.”
“I’m gonna take you to my place, have my cunksi take a look at you,” Bridget said, starting the engine and pulling out onto the street.
“Choonksy?” asked Vern at the unfamiliar word.
“My niece. Gogo.”
“Is that Spanish or something?”
Vern caught the note of derision in Bridget’s answering laughter. “Lakota, actually.”
Vern’s cheek flushed to have her ignorance so fully on display. “Like Sitting Bull, right?” she said, desperate to prove she wasn’t some hick.