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standing next to the eighteen-wheeler, talking to Dockery. The smell of diesel permeated the air, and in the distance I could hear the thawp thawp of the wooden folding chairs as they were snapped shut. Closing time.
    Randall flitted past Pam and me and taunted in a singsong voice, “I get to ride in the big truck and you don’t. Nanny, nanny, nanny.”
    We pulled at our moms. “Why does Randall get to ride with Dockery and we have to pack into the car like sardines? It’s not fair.”
    Mama shook her head in agreement. “Some things aren’t fair. Brother Terrell’s about ready. Get in the car, now.”
    “You, too, Pamela Eloise,” Betty Ann echoed. Pam shot her mama a hard look. She hated her middle name.
    The next revival was scheduled to start a week later just outside of Atlanta. We had plenty of time, but we would drive all night anyway. Brother Terrell couldn’t sleep for hours after a service and saw no reason to wait until the next morning to get on the road.
    For reasons mysterious to me, Mama, Gary, and I had been elevated to first-family status during our first year on the road. We loaned our old Ford to one of the tent families and traveled with the Terrells in their old car. And then the Falcon appeared. One minute we were riding in a beat-up rattletrap with bad tires, faded paint, and a wheezing engine, and the next thing you know, we were cruising in the Falcon, intoxicated with the new-car smell and the knowledge that God placed our needs at the top of his to-do list. One of the faithful had slipped the keys to Brother Terrell at the end of a revival. That made it a miracle car.
    Gary and I crawled into the backseat with my mother. He curled up into a fetal position and rested his head in Mama’s lap. She pressed her forehead against the window, a gesture of exhaustion or need, maybe both. I gathered my legs onto the seat, fit them around Gary’s body, stroked and patted my mother’s leg with my feet. She cupped her fingers around my toes. I leaned my head into the corner where the car door and the seat meet. Up front in the passenger’s seat, Betty Ann folded her coat into a pillow and placed it on the console for Pam.
    “Put your head there, honey.”
    Pam snuggled into what looked like a comfortable nest, so comfortable it made my own position feel hard and cramped in comparison. I registered my dissatisfaction in my standard way.
    “Why can’t we go now?”
    Mama replied in her flat, end-of-the-night voice, “We’ll leave when we’re ready. Close your eyes and go to sleep. Now.”
    “I can’t sleep till we’re going.”
    “Then close your mouth and stop talking.”
    Finally, Brother Terrell opened the driver’s-side door and slid behind the wheel and we bumped over the field and onto the road. His long white sleeves glowed in the light of the tube radio. Hank Williams whined “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Kitty Wells answered with “It Wasn’t God who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” We beamed through the night, our headlights reflecting off the molasses-colored two-lane road. On and on we rolled, anywhere and everywhere, across the dotted lines of the map Betty Ann unfolded and folded, across the imaginary boundaries that separated and divided the land into puzzle pieces of here and there.
    Betty Ann’s head rose like a dark moon above the back of the seat. Dreams merged with reality. A woman moved across the swamps that lined the road, her head rag white, so very white against the night. A long cotton sack hung from her shoulder, but there were no cotton fields here, just water thick as stew and trees that stub and splinter against the night. A hand made its way from the front seat to the back and rested, light and tentative as a mayfly, on my mother’s knee. Someone flicked on the overhead light.
    Betty Ann’s voice rumbled, “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”
    Brother Terrell glanced toward her. “What? I didn’t do nothing.”
    No answer. Just the lick of the