Truck door, road, gone, and nothing behind me but a paid-up rent and a shirt on a hanger.
Took me nine minutes once. It's the easiest thing I know how to do.
I get out of the truck.
* * *
Amara's office has a window to the courtyard, a desk that came out of a school, a couple of armchairs, and a couch nobody sits on.
Dante's against the wall by the door with his arms crossed.
He won't say anything unless she wants him to.
Every time I've been in this room he's been standing right there.
Razor's in the chair by the window with one boot up on his knee and a bottle of water he's not drinking.
Mila's on the couch with the backpack on her lap and both hands on it.
Amara sits on the front edge of the desk, one foot on the floor. "Go."
The heater's running. There's a fly on the inside of the window that's been dead since summer and nobody's moved it.
"My name's Finn Kincaid."
"Keep going."
There's a plate in my mother's wrist.
That's what comes up. Her wrist. The pin scars she covers with her sleeve when she's out, and the way she switched hands for her coffee cup and never switched back.
"They ran her off the road," I say.
Razor's boot comes off his knee. "Who did?"
"My mother. She was—" My hand comes up and does something in the air and I put it back down. "Forty minutes. Upside down."
Razor looks at Amara.
Amara hasn't moved. "Rooster."
"Yeah."
"Come back." She says it the way you'd talk to a horse. "Start somewhere I can follow."
"I don't—" The blood on my forearm's gone dry and tight and I can feel it pull when I move. "It doesn't go in a line. It's not a line, Prez, it's all in there in a pile and I haven't said any of it out loud in ten years."
Dante shifts against the wall.
"Then don't give me a line." Amara leans back on her palms. "Give me whatever's on top."
"My mother's half Mexican."
Dante's arms come uncrossed.
"Her mother. My grandmother, I never met her." I'm looking at the fly. "My mother, Marie, never knew her either. Raised on her father's name, her father's whole world. She doesn't even speak one word of Spanish. She's never been to the town her mother is from and there's nothing of it in her. She presents as white. You’d never know she was Latina. Now, she’s not ashamed of her heritage, but it’s important to say for her whole life, nobody knew."
"Somebody found out," Amara says.
