Monday, 9:40 p.m.

It was 9:40 p.m. when I pulled up in front of Enos's garage, and the neon sign was still buzzing, the way it had in 2018, the only time I'd ever come.

I'd spent almost three hours in room 14 at the motel, on the ground floor, orange door, sitting on the flowered bedspread with my shoes on. I hadn't unpacked. I'd watched the door, the window, the curtain that didn't quite close, and every pair of headlights on the main street had sent a bar of light running across the ceiling. The deputy called to see if you'd gotten in yet. The manager had said it with a smile, happy for me, a woman with a man in uniform waiting on her. I hadn't even asked what time he'd called. I hadn't wanted to know if he'd called before I got to St. George.

By 9:30 I'd figured out I wasn't going to sleep, and that there was only one person in Kanab I could tell my real name to without it getting repeated.

The garage was at the end of the main street, on the south side, where the town starts coming apart into warehouses and empty lots. Two bays, one open, the other shut behind a roll-down door tagged with old signatures. A diesel pump out front under a sheet-metal awning. A blue neon sign that said PENDRY AUTO, and the A in AUTO only lit up one second out of three. In the open bay, under a work light, a pickup up on the lift, and under it, two legs in coveralls.

The dog got to me first. A yellow dog, short in the leg, with a head too big for the rest of him and a tail that whacked everything within reach. He sniffed my hand and sat down on my foot.

“Biscuit,” said the voice under the pickup. “Leave it.”

Biscuit didn't leave it. The legs slid out on the creeper, and Enos rolled out from under the truck, flat on his back, a wrench in his hand, his face black with grease up to the eyebrows. He looked at me from down there. He didn't get up right away.

“Ket.”

“Enos.”

He got up. He was broader than at twenty, slower, with a short beard that didn't suit him and hands black to the wrists. He was twenty-eight. He'd been thrown out of Peniel at fifteen for a battery radio found under his mattress, and dropped off one evening on the side of the highway with a plastic bag. He was the only boy my age I had ever talked to without lowering my eyes. At seven we used to fight over the eggs in the Pendrys' henhouse. That was our friendship.

He looked at the floor before answering the question I hadn't asked. He's always done that. The floor first, as if to make sure it would hold.

“I'll make coffee.”

---

The office was a glass box at the back of the bay, with a counter buried in invoices, a 2023 calendar, and a coffeemaker that had been smelling of burnt coffee since morning. He poured me a cup in a mug with a motor-oil logo on it. He didn't ask what I was doing there. He pushed the sugar cubes toward me and sat down on the other side of the counter on a stool that leaned, with a rag for his hands.

Biscuit lay down under my chair, on my feet.

I drank. The coffee was terrible. It was hot. I drank it to the bottom.

“Somebody called me,” I said. “Last night. 11:04 p.m.”

I told him. The 435 number. The wind. The four words. The callbacks going straight to voicemail. The photo of the dress, sage green, on its nail, which had come in at twenty to four. “Don't call back.”

While I talked, Enos wiped his hands. One finger at a time, like a man who has all night. When I said “435,” the rag stopped. His hands stayed still, one inside the other, inside the rag, for the length of two breaths. He didn't say anything. He started again. Index finger, middle finger.

I saw it. I put it down to what I was telling him. It was heavy, what I was telling him.

“Sel's sixteen,” I said. “They're giving her away on Saturday.”

“I know.”

Everybody knew. It was starting to feel like a lot of people.

“How?”

“The Assembly trucks fill up here on market days. The drivers talk. They talk in front of me because they figure I'm dead.”

He didn't smile when he said it. He wasn't joking.

---

I asked him what it was like now. Peniel. I'd never been back. Not once in ten years had I taken the highway that runs south of there. When I went to Flagstaff for paperwork, I went by way of Kingman, and I didn't look north.

Enos folded the rag into quarters.

“Shut tighter than before. The Father doesn't leave his house anymore. He had the walls built up last year, six feet, they say, white, with an iron gate. The Watchers have new radios. Thaddeus Vosper runs them now, the one with the gray beard. New trucks too, white Fords, and the windows are darker than before. They patrol at night. Peniel people don't go to Page alone anymore, not even the men.”

“And the county?”

He looked at the floor.

“The only uniform anybody sees out there is Gideon. He says he's the go-between with the county.”

He said the name flat, with nothing in it. I took it the way it came.

“He called me this morning,” I said. “He told me not to come. He said he was watching over her.”

Enos didn't answer. He reached under the counter and scratched Biscuit's head, and Biscuit groaned with pleasure.

“Amos is still in there,” he said after a while. “My little brother. He's seventeen. They haven't thrown him out yet. I don't know why. Maybe he's careful. He learned from me.”

His voice cracked on the word “careful.” He covered it by getting up to refill my cup.

---

He was the one who asked. Not straight out. He said:

“The drivers, back then, they said it was Gideon who got you out.”

“It was.”

“You never told me.”

That was true. In 2018, when I'd brought him the card, we hadn't talked about it. We hadn't talked about anything. He'd taken the envelope, slipped it into the pocket of his coveralls, and said, “Okay.” I hadn't managed to say anything to him except thank you.

I held the mug in both hands. I'd never told the story of that night out loud. I'd given it to Lola in one sentence. I'd never told it to someone who knew the road.

“It was the night before the giving. I'd already tried to leave, in March, alone, on foot. They brought me back. So I'd stopped trying. I was waiting. And that night he knocked on my window. About three-thirty. He was in plain clothes. He said, 'Get dressed. No bag.' I got dressed. I climbed out the window. Sel was asleep. I didn't wake her.”

Enos didn't move.

“He had his county 4×4 out on the street, with the headlights on. We took the dirt road. The two cattle guards. I was scared someone would hear us, with the racket they make. He drove normally. He wasn't in a hurry. There was a white pickup parked on the side of the road after the second cattle guard. It didn't move. We drove right past it. Then the highway, and the bridge, at dawn. He left me at the bus station in Flagstaff.”

I took a sip. The coffee had gone cold. I was looking at the office window without seeing it. I was seeing the road.

“It was bright out,” I said.

I said it without thinking, to fill the silence. And the sentence stayed there, in the office, and called up the next one.

“The cliffs were white. You could have read by it.”

I stopped.

I could see it. I'd never looked at it, but I could see it now, ten years later, so sharp it hurt my eyes. The moon. Round, whole, still high over the Kaibab, facing the Vermilion Cliffs. The cliffs, which are red by day and still red at dusk, were bone white in its light. You could see every clump of sagebrush along the road, with its black shadow laid down beside it. You could see the cows lying a hundred yards off. You could see everything. I'd seen Gideon's hands on the wheel, his fingernails, the watch on his wrist. I could have read a letter.

The full moon.

In Peniel, even the children know it. You don't run under a full moon. You wait for the dark of the moon, or the nights of blowing sand, or the stormy nights in July when the rain covers everything. Under a full moon, the Watchers can see a jackrabbit a mile off. I'd known it myself, in March: I'd left on a night of blowing sand, when the moon was nothing but a rusty smudge behind the dust, and they'd caught me anyway.

And that night, the night I left, a car had driven out of Peniel with its headlights on, by the only road, under a moon you could read a newspaper by, and it had gone right past a white pickup that didn't move.

My hands came together around the mug. I let them.

Enos was watching me. He'd figured it out before I did, I think. Or he'd known it for years and had been waiting for me to figure it out on my own, because that's how we do it where we come from: you don't tell people what they haven't found. He smoothed the rag out on the counter.

“Ket. The next day.”

“What about the next day?”

He looked at the floor. A long time, this time. Biscuit sighed under my chair.

“The next day, your father gave the giving feast.”

I didn't understand. I heard the words. I didn't understand them. I didn't want to understand them.

“Meat for a hundred people,” Enos said. “At the House, with the Father. The Assembly drivers were still talking about it at my pump in May. They said it was the best giving feast in years. They said your father slaughtered two steers.”

He raised his eyes to me. His eyes were red, from the neon, or from something else.

“You don't throw a giving feast for a lost girl, Ket.”

The neon buzzed. The A in AUTO lit up, went out. A truck went by in the street, and the glass shook.

They hadn't let me escape. They'd let me go. And the next day, they'd thrown a party.