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nervously. Pretty soon one of us is going to get up and stomp off, leaving the other with the check. I want a divorce.
    I wonder how often my mother felt this way. This is why you’re supposed to have a mother and a father. Parental failings are more easily swallowed when diluted.
    We are sitting in the Paradise Garden Café of the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, geographical coordinates: 36.1161° N, 115.1706° W. I know just where we are. But it’s quite clear that my father and I are lost.

chapter four
Proboscidea : devil’s claw. The seeds of the devil’s claw were adapted to hook onto the legs of large mammals, thereby spreading seeds over miles as the animal walked. Eleven to fifteen inches long, with a grip as firm as a fishing lure, the devil’s claw is the largest and most obstinate hitchhiking seed ever.
    I tie the last pixiebell back into my mother’s shoe as we leave for Portland. I hope it’ll be okay after all this moving and driving in the heat and sliding around on the floor of my father’s truck. If it isn’t, I don’t know what I’m going to do, because keeping it alive is the one important job I have right now. It’s my simplest and clearest mission, and that’s the one thing I’m sure of.
    I do more sullen staring out the window. Dad turns on the radio so that he doesn’t have to hear everything I’m not saying. I am oh so close to Henry Lark, but I don’t know that yet. It’s one of the great and terrible things about big changes, the way they sit unseen just around the next corner, pleasedand calculating, while you innocently get a new stick of gum out of your purse and fold your arms and watch the scenery pass.
    The atlas says it’s 755.29 miles from Las Vegas to Portland. I’d look on my phone, but there’s no service in the desert. The trip will take sixteen hours and seventeen minutes, not counting food and bathroom breaks. We keep heading north until we finally stop in the dead of night in some town called Klamath Falls. If there really are falls there, it’s too dark and we’re too tired to see them.
    The next morning, when we leave Klamath Falls, I am a cranky hostage. If my mother knew (knows) about any of this, she’d be furious . I’m having fantasies of leaving my father behind at the next gas station. But as we come to our first stop sign, right next to a Texaco and a David’s Restaurant (“Home of the Brawny Burger”), there’s this little old lady carrying her dog across the street. I swear to God, it’s taking her fifteen minutes and she’s barely halfway. All this waiting is using up my precious minutes before I’ll need a bathroom break again.
    “I’m gonna honk,” Dad says.
    “You’ll give her a heart attack.”
    “She’d probably beat me up with her purse.”
    “She probably knows kung fu,” I say.
    “Or at least fu,” he says, which cracks us up.
    And just like that, the mad spell between us is broken. We are friends again. We are friends all the way until Eugene,Oregon, when large billows of smoke start pouring out of my father’s truck.
    “Fuck,” my father says.
    For once, it’s an understatement.
    *  *  *
    It’s green here, way more green than at home, and there are lots of Victorian houses too, small ones and big ones. I might like this place, if Dad weren’t whacking the steering wheel over and over again with his palm and swearing. This is bad. This is really, really bad. We’re never going to get home now. Well, he’s had that truck for a billion years. We should’ve taken Mom’s (my) car, which is way more reliable.
    My father runs his hand over his stubble; he hasn’t shaved since we left home. He opens the car door, and I roll down my window and stick my head out to watch. The hood creaks as if in pain when he raises it. The stupidest things make you think of other things. The word “pain,” for example. In your worst fears, you think of cancer and excruciating agony and moaning even. There wasn’t time