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only-child thing. We never played a game
     of Monopoly in which she wasn’t the banker and didn’t get the car as her game piece. Even in pretend games she was tyrannical:
     her favorite person to be was this filthy rich rancher with ten thousand horses and a crop of cowboys who worked for her and
     had to call her “Ma’am,” tipping their hats as they said it. She ordered us around, telling us who we were supposed to be
     — a cowhand or cook or Indian guide. She ordered her parents around too and was rewarded with a brand-new five-dollar bill
     or shiny red cowboy boots or a store-bought violin. If we had to borrow instruments from school, flat and black and smelling
     of other kids’ hands, well then it was only right and fair. Tina was Bub and Hilde’s real daughter.
    Were we real to anyone? That was hard to say. Our father was who knows where, maybe in prison again. Our mother was so many
     years away that I had difficulty conjuring the smallest detail: the shape of her eyes, her smell, the way her hands moved
     in a gesture. And why would I want to think about her? If I allowed myself any image, it was a quick still of her as she must
     have been the day she left in Roger’s car: her head back on the pale vinyl, eyes closed so she could feel it all, the Indian-summer
     sun, wind nuzzling her hand like a cat. With her eyes shut tight, she could be a passenger, just that, rocketing toward what
     was still possible. How good it must have felt to let the road have its way, the dark line of it pulling hard enough to comfort.

    T INA WAS FIERCELY COMMITTED to being a tomboy. She was thick through the torso and neck like her father and never gave a thought to her clothes or hair,
     or about harassing the neighbor kids by picking up dried horse turds and chucking them like dirt clods. Maybe this was why
     these kids weren’t exactly amenable when my sisters and I tried to make friends with them — at least not at first. The Swensons,
     who lived directly across the street, had four children, a girl our age and three older boys. Two houses to their left were
     the Lindes, with a boy and a girl. Together, the six had built a sturdy-looking plywood fort set back on an empty property.
     They spent time there after school and on weekends, and one Saturday, my sisters and I got brave enough to go over and introduce
     ourselves. We even convinced Tina to come along. Maybe they had binoculars, or maybe they had just been waiting for our arrival,
     sure we’d come poking around sooner or later, but before we were even halfway through the field, the kids ran out, whooping
     and jeering. They carried spiny masses of uprooted star thistle as weapons, and we ran for all we were worth.
    About twenty yards from our property, the kids gave up the chase, turning back toward the fort, and that’s when I ran onto
     a nail with my full weight, piercing my sneaker and instep. When I got to the house, hobbling and howling, Bub pulled off
     my sneaker to reveal a deep pink hole speckled with flakes of rust. Some of the pieces he dug out with his pocketknife; others
     he flushed with alcohol. I screamed and squirmed until he pronounced me cured. Two days later, I was reading on the couch
     with my shoes off when Bub noticed the red line snaking over my ankle and up the side of my leg. I guess I had noticed it
     too, but thought it was part of the whole step-on-a-nail process. No, he said. This was serious. He took me to the doctor,
     who numbed my foot and poked around in the nail hole with a silver tool that looked like the thing you use to get at nut meat.
     It didn’t take him long to root out a piece of rust Bub had missed. It was small, the size of a button on a doll’s dress,
     but I felt I might throw up thinking about it. Not only was it in there without my knowing, but my body had oozed around it
     for days, festering.
    “That red line,” said the doctor, pointing, “was headed for your heart. That’s what poison