It was a hypnotizing afternoon of scanning the road ahead of us for just one abandoned shoe. We were on a westbound highway, and just about anyone knows you can’t get to Florida driving west, so I found myself counting the white dashes of the center line and imagining that each one represented a day that would pass before we’d ever find two shoes that matched each other. Three hundred and seventy-four dashes had gone by before Dad stirred me from my daze.

“What rhymes with suds?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Floods?”

Dad looked at me like, Now what did you have to go all weather on me for.

“Maybe cruds?” I said. “Or duds.”

“Duds. That’s a good one,” he said. “What about bubble? What all rhymes with bubble?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Just humor me,” he said. “Is flubble a word?”

“I’m pretty sure not,” I said. “How about stubble? Or rubble? Or trouble?”

“That’s it! Trouble it is.”

And trouble it was indeed. The way I saw it, not only had my mom gone away, but now my dad may very well have gone nutty. Fortunately, I remembered Aunt Jo telling Syd again and again to Leave trouble well enough alone. So that’s exactly what I did. I excused myself back to my little room and immediately put Ken’s address in my can it! box, alongside the Castanea dentata tree tag.

For the rest of the afternoon, Dad seemed to drive aimlessly, merging on and off exit ramps and swoopty-loops, passing up towns, small and big. Despite the back-andforth, I was able to balance pretty well on my knees to keep a steady watch of the sights out the back window. Houses strung with Christmas-in-June lights. Deer families bounding across the road. Shotgun pellet dents in the back of every sign. There were things I’d never seen before that passed across the window, like a mountain of junked-out cars and even a trailer home built into the side of a hill. Neat things. Things that would have even been more enjoyable alongside a mom in a Volkswagen convertible, where I might still notice them despite much wind-whipped hair and girly conversation.

Once my legs and the sunlight gave out, I lay down and thought about how Syd must be spending his day, and hoped that he hadn’t busted that cloud piñata with a stick as soon as we’d left. I thought about how it would have been great to have even a fake Syd along for the ride, to tell him about beef jerky and old shoes and a dad talking nonsense like a Cheshire Cat. When The Roast climbed a big hill, a few loose colored pencils rolled under the curtain into my space. So with my hand dangling at the floor, I waited patiently for the next hill and the next delivery. I propped my feet on the wall below the Eiffel Tower poster and lifted the bottom corners of it with my big toes. It sure did look like a good blank canvas for some permanent wall noodling hidden under there. That is, for another kid who had something worth putting there. I figured I’d just have to be satisfied with noodling in my Book of In-Betweens.

Just after another handful of pencils arrived, The Roast took a swerve to the side of the road so sudden, there wasn’t even time for a “Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!” to burst out of my dad. All ten encyclopedias came tumbling off the shelf in an avalanche of old information.

“Sorry about that,” Dad said. “You in one piece back there?”

Miffed that he’d already forced me to break a Rule of The Roast, I crawled around the floor, gathering as many books as I could into one armload. The Roast came to a stop, and when I got up, there was my dad standing in the weak glow of the ceiling light. He held a fishing pole that looked remarkably familiar.

“Cass, would you like to do the honors?” he said, extending the pole in my direction.

I dropped the books onto the desk and took hold of the handle. If it had been a surgeon’s knife in my hand, I couldn’t have been less sure of what to do next.

“Allow me to bestow upon you the honor of being the first to ever assume command of Ye Olde Sneaker Reacher,” he said.

The pole was only about as tall as my hip and looked like a piece of bamboo with a reel attached and some metal loops with fishing line strung through them. At the end of the line, there was a little silvery hook. I ran my fingers across the pole, feeling the knuckles along its length, and sure enough, it was bamboo. I could also see and feel some rough spots on it, spots in the shapes of little lightnings that someone had tried to sandpaper off.

“This is Mom’s piñata whacker,” I said.

“It was her piñata whacker,” said Dad. “Now it’s our sneaker reacher.

“Climb on up,” he added. “I saw some reflector strips flash in the headlights.” Dad stood on his knees on the couch and wiped some fog off the side window with his hand. I stepped up onto the cushion next to him, scraping the tip of the rod along the ceiling of The Roast. With a grunt, he slid the window to the side and motioned for me to have a look.

I leaned as much of me as I could out the open window and saw that we were parked well off to the side of a two-lane highway. It was that time of day when the sunset has just left some orangey-pink behind, and the air was still muggy. The only sign of life nearby was a building that had been a gas station, the whole thing rusted and covered in vines. Just a stone’s throw up the road, I could already see the welcome to mississippi sign, with the loops of its four S’s all holding on to each other. There were no headlights other than ours for as far as I could see in either direction.

I turned my attention to the road itself, and sure enough, there it sat, smack in the middle of all that near-nothingness: a shoe on the center line of the highway. One single running shoe, with steam rising all around, like someone had run so fast his foot had just burned right out of it.

Wriggling my upper half back into The Roast, I fumbled around with the bamboo rod. I had imagined many times what the world was like beyond Olyn, but I’d sure never pictured myself parked crooked in an RV on the shoulder of an Alabama highway holding a knobbly fishing pole. I could almost hear Syd doing that Twilight Zone theme he does when the electricity flashes on and off.

“Um, Dad, I don’t know…”

“I see you’re feeling uneasy, so I can try it first,” he said. “The Reacher, please.” He held his hand out, took the pole, and ever so gently, threaded it through the long, rectangular window above the couch. Then he made a slight jerking motion with his wrist.

“Rats,” he grumbled.

Then another jerk.

“Shoot.”

And another.

“Nuts. That’s three strikes for me,” he said. “You want to give it a go?”

“Sure,” I said reluctantly.

I wrapped both my hands around the handle, dug my tiptoes into the couch, and leaned myself and the pole out the window. Fixing my eyes on the crisscross of the shoelaces, I gave the Reacher a hard fling, and before I could even see what I had done, my dad wigged out like I’d just won a gold medal.

“You’ve got it, Cass!” he shouted. “Now reel that sucker in quick, before any cars come!”

I turned and turned the reel until my arm cramped. We both watched the shoe dance backward across the road and then bob right on up the side of the RV. I felt a big whew when Dad volunteered to take it off the hook. He stuck his hand right down into that steamy sneaker and said, “You know, I don’t think this is what your mom meant by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

“Yeah, I doubt it,” I said, having to bite the insides of my cheeks to make my smile flatten out. I couldn’t believe I’d hooked the thing in one throw. I mostly couldn’t believe I was actually proud of myself for catching a shoe.

“You know what this means, right?” Dad said, as he pulled open my curtain, unplugged the velvet pillow, and pushed the shoe into the hole in the side of my box-bed. “It means the very next town we see is our first stop.”

Dad flicked off the overhead light and fumbled his way back to the front, where he carefully laid Ye Olde Sneaker Reacher across the dashboard before starting the engine. While he coasted us to the first off-ramp in Mississippi, I arranged the encyclopedias back on the shelf as best I could by the glow coming through the domed moonroof.

“Nimble Creek, Exit A, here we come!” Dad called out as I unfolded my afghan, stuffed the little pillow back into its spot, and let loose my little poinsettia curtain, which had already shed so many glitters that the name Cass looked more like “Cuss.” We parked for the night in the lot of an abandoned minigolf place, where each hole was decorated to look like a different fairy tale. Crumbling and faded as the displays were, I could still make out Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Princess and the Pea.

After a supper of burritos that stayed cold in the middle despite spinning for thirty minutes in the little microwave, I got myself ready for bed in the tiny bathroom, where my elbow bumped the wall a hundred times during teeth-brushing, and I put both my legs through the same hole of my jammies twice before getting it right. Then I listened to my dad run through his own bedtime routine. There was some gargling and spitting, some rolltop desk top-rolling and page-turning, some general bumping about, a quiet, “Good night, Cass. Big things happening in Nimble Creek tomorrow.” And then, nothing but snore.

I balled up one end of the big afghan to use as my new pillow, thankful for my own smarts and to Mr. and Mrs. Winky Pizza that I was no longer the Princess and the P.U. The cushion between me and the world’s largest shoe box was pleasantly squishy, but still I had a hard time snoozing under the weight of the weirdness around me. What on earth were we about to do in Nimble Creek? Sell invisible meat? It sure wouldn’t make things much weirder, I thought.

It was far too dark to add anything to the Book of In-Betweens, so instead I ate a whole bag of Chex Mix, tugged at my eyebrows a bit, and then totally perfected the Knotty Ball of Failure with my finger string. When all of that failed to lull me to sleep, I tried to make it through my front-and-back-of-forever prayer for the first time in days. As I imagined myself sitting on the bare stump of a Castanea dentata tree, my ancestors and descendants marched by like always, but this time none of them would wave or even smile. Instead, they all just walked past carrying suitcases. Probably going to Florida without me. Amen.