Page 7 of An Honest Lie

“He was different with you than he was with me,” she said simply.

They hadn’t known a lot of people in California, just her dad’s family, and they were kind of strange, but it was still the only place she’d ever lived. Her mama had left her family behind when she’d met Summer’s dad and gotten pregnant. As much as Summer scanned her memory, she couldn’t recall a time her mom had friends over or went out to lunch with someone. Anger bounced up into her chest and she didn’t know what to do with it: anger at her dad, anger at her mom—she was even mad at herself.

“You hate talking about Dad.” Her voice was hurt, accusatory. Again, it had just sprung into her head and she’d said it.

“I don’t,” her mother said, and then she sighed deeply. “Look, Dad owed a lot of people money. That’s why we had to leave. Awful people...no, scary people,” she corrected herself. “We couldn’t stay there.”

“Why couldn’t you keep babysitting and pay them back?” Summer asked.

“Hon...” Her mother’s voice was strained. “I could babysit for the rest of my life and still not be able to pay those guys.”

“Okay.” It was the best peace offering she could make.

“It’s you and me now, kiddo.”

“And, like, all the people we’re going to live with.”

Her mother’s laugh filled up the whole car and Summer felt happy again. Sometimes the things she said made her mother upset, and other times she’d laugh harder than Summer had ever heard. She tried not to say the wrong things, but it was hard to know what exactly it was that made adults upset—they were like seesaws.

An hour later, a row of small, stucco homes appeared on their right: they looked like toenails painted pink and green and yellow.

“Is that it?” Summer asked, scanning the desert for more homes and seeing only scrub bushes.

“The town is called Friendship, isn’t that cute?” Lorraine said, ignoring her. She pointed to the sign as they sped by and Summer caught a glimpse of the name with the wordsEstablished 1913beneath it.

“Why is there a town way out here?”

“It was a mining town, part of the boom at the turn of the century, I’m guessing. When the minerals run out, the people do, too.”

They passed a row of buildings and she craned her neck around to see what they were: a diner, a place called Red’s and a two-pump gas station next to what looked like a motel...then more nothing. That was it. She slouched back in her seat, disappointed. When her mama had told her they were going to Nevada, she’d been excited about the bright, flashing lights of Las Vegas. But Vegas was at least an hour from where they were going. Friendship was just a boring town in the middle of the desert.

“There’s some kind of famous cactus back there. People drive from all over to see it!” Lorraine was using her overly cheerful voice, something she did when she was nervous.

Summer hated when adults tried to make boring things sound fun; who did they think they were fooling, anyway?

“Cool.” She traced the stitching on the back of the seat, not bothering to look.

Her mother, who usually called her out when she was rude, was leaning all the way forward in her seat, oblivious as she studied the road ahead of her.

“It should be coming up...”

Summer rolled her eyes but scanned the desert for it, anyway.

“Does itlooklike a prison?” She’d seen them on the Lifetime movies her mother watched: gray places with bars over the windows and people dressed in orange.

“Don’t think of it like a prison,” her mother said. “He’s renovated the inside with the money his adoptive mother left him.” She was checking her reflection in the rearview mirror. “It’s more like living in an apartment building. They have a vegetable garden, an apricot orchard and goats and chickens. There’s a cafeteria where everyone has their meals together.”

“He”: her mother’s friend—the help-promiser. “Are the goats and chickens in prison, or to be eaten by the prisoners?” She’d meant for it to be funny, but by the look on Mama’s face, she’d said the wrong thing again—the thing her dad would have said. Summer could taste the dust from outside coating her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said quickly, not wanting to ruin the mood. “Can I have a sip of that water?”

The plastic water bottle crackled when Summer took it from her mother’s hand. She was lifting the bottle to her lips when an odd shape rose out of the desert, on her right.

“Look, is that it?” She pointed out the window at the pale building that rose out of the dirt like a squat sandcastle. A single road led down to the building. To reach it, they would have to pass through a gate. The gate was an ugly, solid, metal thing; Summer resented that she couldn’t see through it, but now someone was stepping out of the little shack to their left and she switched her attention to the thickset woman wearing a guard’s uniform.

Her mama said a bad word, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel like she did when she was nervous. “Summer, sit back,” she said.

The woman was around her mom’s age, and she had crunchy-looking blond hair that zigzagged out from her head like electrified noodles.

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