She poked the pacifier in Lucy’s mouth, but the baby spat it out, crying harder now. A car passed on the road, its tires hissing through rainwater. She followed it with her eyes, until it turned the corner and was only a rumble in the distance, a ribbon of blue smoke near the stop sign. How she longed to be inside that car, moving somewhere. Anywhere.
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We tracked as much dirt inside as the dogs, but the adults didn’t rise to chide us or play their in-charge roles. They let us live this disaster. They lived it, too. We were mostly, as the school counselor noted over the phone to Mama, “unsupervised.”
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