GUS

IT TAKES TEN minutes to reach the place that started and ended everything.

A mile past downtown, the Munch-O Mills plant chugs its sweetness into the air. There’s a factory feel to this area filled with smokestacks and parking lots that gray the landscape. But factories mean work, and the houses on the fringes aren’t in bad shape—maybe the paint is chipping or there are junky old swing sets polluting yards.

If you keep driving past the plant, the roads become bumpier and the grass becomes distended. Suddenly you’re at Harrison Farm. The decaying Harrison Farm, collapsed barn and all, is almost glamorous compared to what comes after.

Crooked fence posts encompass the entire length of Spence Salvage. Those wouldn’t keep anything out if not for the chicken wire wound between them. Still, there are places where the fence fails, dips to the dirt and vanishes in tall grass. In those places, the fence posts look like tombstones.

I’ve never been this close.

The truck rattles, and I nearly bite my tongue—I’ve drifted onto the rumble strips. I right the wheel, but I’m struggling. I need to stop and breathe, but I keep driving, so slowly that I might as well take my foot off the gas. The fence seems to stretch for miles, but I know it’s only forty acres.

I finally spot the driveway and pull up onto the shoulder. The welcome sign is rotting in places, and the chains suspending it have rusted to perpetual stillness. Alongside the words Spence Salvage, someone’s clumsily painted a wrench. A plastic orange and black CLOSED sign is bolted to the wood.

I switch into park. I roll down the windows. This is Tamara’s truck, so there are no pictures of Dad here. But Mom, Tam, and me are on the dashboard, a curling photo of the three of us at Mammoth Cave.

Yesterday Kalyn told me never to come here. The last thing I want is to come home and find Mom mummifying on the couch and Tamara outside. The last thing I want is to go back to school and be pitied, the boy in the pumpkin patch.

I don’t want our lives turned into a whodunit. I don’t want this case reopened. I don’t want Dad’s face to become a thing I hate seeing. So what am I doing here?

I climb out of the truck. No cars have passed, and I doubt any will. This place is out of business. People don’t come here. I weave along the shoulder until I’m standing in the middle of that long driveway.

I lift my eyes from my feet.

Lining the driveway are rows and rows of cars in all sizes and colors. The only thing they have in common is a state of disrepair. There isn’t a single one that looks like it could leave this yard. Some of the vehicles are lopsided, even sunken into the ground. They crowd the driveway so closely that I can’t tell where it ends.

Did Dad actually walk down here once? Did he do it with a knife in his hand?

I want to believe no. I want to believe this is Mordor. I want to think that the story I’ve been told since the day I was born is nonfiction. Not because I want Dad to have been murdered, but because I want to know that some portion of my life is a certainty.

I’ve never questioned our truth: Dad was kidnapped during his senior homecoming game, taken here, shot dead, and shoved into a trunk like secondhand clothes. That story won our case and became America’s truth after Grandpa Ellis bribed the best prosecuting attorney in the Bible Belt.

We stopped seeing Grandpa Ellis years ago. Before that, he was a fixture in our lives. We used to visit him for Sunday dinner.

Mom would put on makeup and a smile and act like leaving the house was as easy as breathing, but she’d spend a few seconds hyperventilating in the car, hands stuck to the wheel, before dabbing at her mascara and stepping outside.

Whenever we knocked on the door, Grandpa looked unhappy to see Mom. The feeling was definitely mutual. But Grandpa Ellis helped Mom pay rent before she started making steady ghostwriting money, and he paid for me to go to summer camp. We couldn’t turn down his invitations.

He lives in a huge cabin thirty minutes out of Samsboro, on a wooded hill near Lake Cumberland. Grandpa Ellis didn’t keep any pictures of Dad around, although family trophies lined the walls.

Grandpa always sat at the head of the table, even though there were only three of us. He hardly spoke, just asked how school was going for me; he didn’t ask about Mom. He only once talked about Dad and the Spences—on the day he kicked us out for good, the day Mom told Grandpa she was seeing someone.

Grandpa Ellis has Dad’s eyes, but sharpened to knifepoints. When Mom mentioned Tam, he spat out his food, stood up straight, and pointed us to the door.

“You’re as evil as any Spence,” he told Mom’s back. “You’re as good as killing him all over again.”

It wasn’t just a cruel thing to say. It was also the only time I ever heard Grandpa Ellis’s voice crack. It was the first time I wondered whether, as much as it sucked for me to grow up without a dad, having and losing a son could be worse.

When we got back to the car, Mom didn’t hyperventilate. She laughed, a little madly. “Well, that book’s finally shut.”

An icy October wind is blowing. The grass bows away from me, and unseen dashboards in the salvage yard creak in the gusts.

When do words like “evil” start sticking? If they stick, does that make them true? People have called me a thousand names. I call myself names. But I choose to believe that those names aren’t all I am.

A Spence isn’t all that Kalyn is, either. Not even close.

I wonder if she’s playing hooky. I wonder if she’s mummifying in front of a TV at the end of this driveway, or throwing eggs at strangers, or batting her lashes at boys.

I know what I’m doing here. Despite it all, I want to see her.

But I can’t bring myself to walk down this driveway.