ON MY RETURN to Arizona, I drove through the pine forests of the Florida panhandle into Alabama, across water and marsh. I followed a route similar to the one my mother had taken when she and Alex’s father drove to Arizona for her brother Dundee’s funeral.*1 I stayed the night with a friend in Missouri, then picked up a hitchhiker at a gas station on the Mississippi-Louisiana border: a greasy kitten that I watched try to climb into the engine of a parked car. A woman with a van full of kids helped me catch him, though she told me she couldn’t take him home because of her dogs. On the road, he climbed onto my shoulder and cried out the window. I pulled over at a rest stop and considered letting him out, but after another hour, he stopped crying and fell asleep in the crook of my arm.*2 I stroked my thumb over his fish-bone ribs. I pretended he was the great- or great-great-grandchild of the cat we lost on the road trip my mother, my father, my sister, and I had taken to the reservation when I was a girl. I named him Miss. Always missing.*3 Every time I stopped for gas, I gave him extra time to use the litter box and eat.*4 Outside Dallas, I detoured to Petco and bought him a carrier and a toy mouse on a wire to chase in the footwell. I texted my aunt and warned her I had picked up a stray kitten. I was supposed to stay with her on my return, for a three-day weaving class in Gallup, but I told her I could find another place to stay. She told me not to worry and that she would see me soon. We stopped in Lubbock, where Nathan had moved, though he was out of state for fieldwork. He told me where to find the key and asked me to feed Goob, who growled at the kitten under the bedroom door.*5 The next morning, we left for our last leg of the trip through New Mexico.*6 The kitten fell asleep in the sun on the dashboard.
*1 March 4, 1995. “Set out from Tallahassee. We slept in the van. That night, a cop scared the shit out of us becuz we had to move.”
*2 “We still cruising through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.”
*3 March 5, 1995. At the top of the entry, my mother crosses out the line “I’m off will be spending it with the girls.” Behind these words, she writes only: not! In the revised entry, she writes, “This morning I woke up thinking of Dundee. And were off what a trip through Texas.”
*4 “And were off what a trip through Texas. First through Houston then Dallas after that straight up to Amarillo.”
*5 “We wanted a beer that evening but we kept hitting dry counties. Boy was he upset.”
*6 “then we reach New Mexico about 8:00 P.M. and we stopped at a convenience store for beer but no sale in New M. So we got a room went to dinner then to bed.”