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bottled buck scent he’d rubbed on drifted into my bedroom, preventing me from falling back to sleep. I turned on the radio beside my bed and listened to Ron Ben Strong, a local evangelist, brief his flock about a government satellite whose mission, he said, was to spy on Christians’ houses and track the titles of the books they read. Like the rest of my family, I wasn’t religious, but I’d started to envy people who were. They seemed to know just what and whom to be afraid of.
    After a breakfast of eggs and venison sausage that I only managed to eat two bites of, Joel and I went to the motor home. I knocked. From visiting a nursing home that Audrey worked in once, I’d learned the old people needed their privacy because they were always fussing with their bodies, dealing with ingrown nails and corns and such. I was already feeling pangs of indigestion and I didn’t want to walk in on something sickening.
    Grandpa showed us inside with a gesture that seemed too sweeping for the tiny space. Grandma waved to us from her fold-down bed in the sleeping compartmentbehind the bathroom. A magazine lay open on her lap and a cigarette in an ashtray on the sheet sent up a blue plume.
    “I just learned something important,” she told Joel, tapping a finger on her magazine page. “If you’re being assaulted in a lonely place and there’s no one around to hear you scream, scream anyway. It breaks the attacker’s momentum.”
    “Okay,” Joel said.
    “Assault is a crime of momentum,” Grandma said. “And it’s not just the blacks you have to be afraid of now. It’s the Europeans, too.”
    “Hush, Alice,” Grandpa said.
    “He needs to know this.”
    “He doesn’t need to know it now. Hush up.”
    We passed the morning playing along with game shows on the motor home’s portable TV. On the first show, the object was to guess the prices of ordinary household items. Grandpa’s guesses were all dead-on, as if he’d priced the items only yesterday, but Grandma’s guesses simply made no sense. She priced a gas barbecue at a thousand dollars, a Mr. Coffee at three, a wok at ninety. I wondered when she’d last been in a store. I could only conclude that Grandpa did all their shopping.
    As Grandpa prepared our lunch on the small stove, I realized that the Horizoneer was growing on me. He whipped up our macaroni and cheese in no time, maneuvering in the miniature kitchen like an airline pilot in acockpit. We ate at a table with an inlaid checkerboard, and without getting up from his revolving stool, Grandpa was able to open the refrigerator and get us bottles of Coke. Compared to the compact, convenient motor home, the house I’d grown up in seemed huge and wasteful—an echoey shell that I frequently felt lost in.
    “Coffee, Justin?” Grandpa asked.
    “No thanks. Don’t drink it.”
    “It’s good. It’s time to start.”
    We drank the coffee out of plastic mugs whose bottoms were weighted so they wouldn’t spill. The first sip burned my tongue. The second soothed it. By the third sip, I wanted another cup. It was that way with everything I liked.
    “It’s nice in here,” I said. “I like this life.”
    “We’ll take you boys on a trip sometime,” said Grandpa.
    “Fat chance,” Grandma said. “Our son would never let them. They’d see we were fun, not the creeps he makes us out to be.”
    Grandpa refilled my cup. “Don’t listen to this. She’s not herself this week. There’s a sedative that she’s run out of and no one in Minnesota seems to carry it.”
    “They carry it,” Grandma said, “but not in capsules. I only take capsules. My throat’s too tender for pills.”
    She squeezed her neck and made a choking face. Then she reopened her murder magazine. “Everyone listen up: I have a quiz. Which are deadlier, pistols orblunt instruments? It’s not what you’d think, so take a little time.”

    Mike seemed to be hiding something at dinner that night. He was too considerate, too gentle. His