loft above one of my father’s restaurants, I would almost always drift, my eyes turning unfocused and hazy. She would gently rub her fingers over the scars on my body, never asking for the stories that would explain them.
And then the last night: Our bodies had just relaxed, a thin layer of cooling sweat between us, and her soft fingers gently traced the scar on my forehead, the one provided by Ettore. I stared out the window into the blur of streetlights. She stopped stroking my temple, froze for a few seconds before her body went completely limp.
I could sense her staring at me. “Where are you?” she said.
How could I explain? I was in the Northwest, southern Texas, rusting Ohio and Michigan villages.
Then: “Is there someone else?”
I let out a quiet sigh before eventually answering. “Not the way you’re thinking.”
The end of the semester meant my less occupied mind had no excuse to remain in New York; the fantasy would be actualized.
The mere suggestion of locating Melody—under the guise of her elimination—was welcomed by all. At this point, my father wanted everything finished on the McCartney docket, and he was becoming impatient with my insistence on doing it myself. The trip to see Randall was imminent. He’d just become a senior database administrator with Justice, which meant he could access almost any records he chose without a trace—on the back end, as he called it—one of a very few trusted technologists who could see data without officially entering into the system as a general user. Randall knew the value of his currency had improved, and he tried once—once—to raise the stakes with us, to suggest he and anyone from our crew might be peers, that our relationship should be valued mutually. This notion was quickly corrected by way of a visit to Randall’s home by me and Peter, during which Peter slammed Randall’s face down onto his computer keyboard so many times that once Randall fell back into his office chair, the Y, G, and M keys were stuck to his forehead. Our relationship, going forward, was fully understood.
And regardless of the level of his current debt, even if he had been paid in full he would have done as we asked. We owned him at that point. We had become bullies who treated him with a neutral spirit as long as he always forked over his lunch money without dispute.
The lunch money he gave us that early summer day: Shelly Jones, Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.
SIX
The drive was far more enjoyable without my psycho cousin. Being alone with my thoughts outranked being alone with Ettore. The journey was taken in the promised reward from my father for my attempts on the McCartneys: a late-model black Ford Mustang convertible, a car representing something I constantly wanted to forget. It did, however, move. Once I’d escaped New York and suffered through the overburdened New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland highways, entering West Virginia couldn’t have felt more welcome if the state had opened its lonely arms and pulled me to its chest. Interstate 79, which cuts a swath through the center of the state like a giant comma, might be the most abandoned road you can travel, the road cresting and descending countless mountaintops, where the speed limit was seventy miles per hour and where my speed was limited only by what the car felt comfortable delivering. The Mustang never complained.
Even if I’d not seen the WELCOME TO KENTUCKY sign as I crossed the line, I would have known I’d arrived. Traveling west out of Huntington, West Virginia, on Interstate 64, you can sense the change in the environment, as though those who settled Kentucky looked over their shoulders and casually said to the east, “You can keep all of that.” Kentucky fields really are green, smooth and curved like the terrain of a woman’s body, blemished only by horses of random size and color. This land of horse racing and whiskey gave me the sense that people here were healthy and happy—happy supplying the raw materials for the addictions my family kept alive and well in those beneath us. And as I made my way westward, I became increasingly pleased that Melody would be able to reside here for whatever amount of time was allowed.
I’d left New York at six in the morning on that Saturday in late June. By the time I was nearing Lawrenceburg, it was only five-thirty that afternoon. The anticipation of seeing Melody deepened in my chest as each