After dinner, within minutes of patting the hash brown grease from his beard, Dad fell asleep sitting straight up. I let him be and retired to my room, where I was thrilled to find an almost full, perfect-for-noodling moon beaming into the little back window of The Roast. Careful to tilt each Sharpie so it wouldn’t make a squeak on the wall, I rooted and branched my tree like crazy for almost an hour, until a fresh rustling around from the other side of The Roast startled me so, I dropped my marker cap at my feet. It sounded as if Dad was right there, outside my curtain, rummaging through the rolltop desk for something. I held my marker and my breathing as still as I could to listen.

“Cass? You awake?” he whispered, and in response I made the most realistic sleep noise I could conjure. After Dad stopped calling to me, there wasn’t another peep from him, other than a little bit of shuffling around the RV and some page-turning here and there.

As I carefully pressed the Eiffel Tower flat against the wall and taped the bottom corners onto their spots, I noticed that I’d accidentally noodled beyond the borders of the poster. Pieces of tree crept out from under it in all directions. I’d have to put off making a plan to keep that hidden, though, since capping the Sharpie was the most pressing task at hand. To aid in my search for the missing cap, I dangled upside down off my bed and fumbled around on the floor for a good while, until I was totally distracted by a small spot of light glowing right through my tablecloth curtain. I watched the little light flit to and fro for at least a minute before I talked myself into stepping up onto my box-bed and steadying against the back wall of the RV to have a better look.

I stood teetering on my toes to see over the curtain. There was Dad, in a torn undershirt and some cutoff sweats, sitting quietly at the rolltop desk. On his head he wore a sweatband with a tiny flashlight stuck down through the side, and the light shone down on a lap tray made from our Scrabble box. The rolltop was wide open, and inside it were the scattered tools of a manicure kit. An encyclopedia volume lay stretched open across the desktop.

Dad covered his eyes with his left hand, like he didn’t trust himself to just plain old shut them. Then he made his right hand into a fist with one finger pointed, circled it in the air above the book, and lowered it in a mini-twister. When his finger landed on the page, he peeked from behind his hand to see where he had landed. He cocked his head just right, to aim the weak flashlight at the page, and leaned in close to the book. From so high up, I couldn’t begin to tell what he was reading, but then I saw his lips say and say again, almost without a sound, “‘Thomas Edison, American inventor, developer of many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting electric lightbulb.’”

And then he repeated, like he was memorizing for a test, “T E…Thomas Edison…inventor of the light-bulb…T E…Thomas Edison.”

My legs stuck together as I stood there watching, and sweat beaded on my dad’s brow. Closing the book ever so quietly and still saying “T E, T E, T E” to himself, Dad leaned as far and low as he could to grab something from off the floor. He came back up with the plastic Econo Lodge bag, turning it upside down by its corners real slow and careful, like he didn’t want the little shampoos to make a racket. But what poured out of that bag was definitely not shampoos, and I had to rub my eyes to believe what I was seeing. It was soap, and a whole pile of them, all blank and white as my own face. No way no way no way, I thought. There’s got to be a good explanation for this.

Dad grabbed a pair of tweezers from the manicure set, picked a small soap from the pile, and laid it gently on the Scrabble box in his lap. Softly in the background, Gordon Lightfoot sang about feeling like he’s winning when he’s losing again. My dad laid down the tweezers, grabbed the nail file, and with the edge of it shaved the soap down to a sliver. And right there, in the glow of his tiny spotlight shining down, with the sharp point of the file, Dad scraped the letters T E into that soap sliver. When he was done, he blew on the soap, blasting the shavings onto the floor and shoving them beneath the desk with his sock foot. As he stood to carry the box lid over to the couch, my tummy growled and almost gave me away. I squeezed on my gut so tight to shush its growling, baby stars danced in front of my eyes.

I hoped hard that my late-night hunger was making me imagine things. Or maybe that I’d dangled upside down too long looking for the marker cap, and now my mind was playing tricks on me. But when the growling stopped and the stars cleared, I looked again to see my dad pop the latch on the MBM suitcase, open it wide, tilt the Scrabble lid up like a slide, and send the newly carved soap sliver sledding into the case. Suddenly, my hope and my joy and my legs all failed me at the same time, sending me sliding down the back wall of The Roast. As I sunk to the floor, a lightbulb of understanding zutzed on and off above my head, with a different cruel flash of thought each time. It’s all fake. The soaps. The case. The suit. Everything.

I crumpled myself into a ball next to my bed, in a spot right between the beauty box and my backpack, and right on top of the lost Sharpie cap. Then, from my pack, I felt with my thumb for the sharpest pencil in there, pulled my curtain tight, and poked the biggest hole possible right through it. Sitting with my back to the big shoe box, I watched my dad squint, point, and carve, again and again. Every time, it was the same. He’d grab a fresh encyclopedia, flop it open, and do an eeny-meeny-miny motion until he found a name, any name. Then he’d pick up a blank soap from the desk, shave it down, carve the initials right in, and slide it into the suitcase. When he scraped, some of the soaps would bust in two, and with his fingertips, he crumbled those into tiny crumbs and piled them on one of the napkins.

The whole time I watched, it felt as if I, Dad, The Roast, and everything in it were tumbling down a mountainside, like all things good and nasty deafeningly clanking against each other. All I could imagine were flicker-flashes of the faces of people helped by our so-called magic; memories that had suddenly become tangled in sickening questions. How could he? How did he? Had he fooled me? Had he fooled us all?

After closing and shoving the case back into place for the last time, Dad stepped gingerly past the desk and into the bathroom, grabbing the napkin full of broken soaps on the way.

And in one big flush, the crumbles…and Sway…were no more.