We are going to Kentucky, or St. Louis, or Texas to see his family. Always them but not always at once. At Onces have been harder as we get older. Katherine is now in North Carolina with a husband and a dog. Erin is now in Hawaii with a husband and the military. Brian is somewhere maybe Denver maybe home. Zach has moved out. (The four of us have stayed the same; I think it works. I don’t want to be gone when things happen like they were when our parents get old) There used to be Kentucky with its steep hilled driveway and vacant lot filled with chimney swifts and bats (Adam once told me a ghost story about a blind driver, where all you’d see was headlights. When big silent lights pointed into the parking lot we ran all the way back to the carport,) but now there is only a cemetery with a mountain view and a house I never fully explored (too afraid of ladders to see the lofts where they used to play, even when we were cleaning it out). There is still St. Louis with its windows full of spiders and forgotten front-of-house (a whole living and dining room we never go in, dead space for company), bedroom ceilings glowing with plastic stars, Kentucky purple (red?) couches in the den only recently (? Seven Years is not recent). St. Louis(?) is why I’m afraid of heights (The bar of the plastic chairlift over the lake was up to my chin, when I was seven I couldn’t finish the obstacle course with my dad because the wood moved.) There is still Texas with it's wide ranch house and large backyard (I was in the bathtub when my brother fell on the hill of fire ants under the swings I don't remember. I was also in the bathtub when Gramma Joan and Grampa Crocker took a trip to Illinois instead, there was still a sliding shower door back then) and lizards on the evening bricks, (there was also a snail, once. I've never seen snails anywhere else,) watching my brother and cousins play video games because I’m bad with the controller, and Adam got tired of it, (I did play races with the older kids, I still remember how the beach level looked), braiding hair and a small wedding with pies instead of cake. Joan didn’t remember us by then. (I look the most like her of us three girls, they say, and I want to find her graduation photo to see). The second wedding had to be fast, before he was restationed. (There wasn't time for us to go). We are always driving to these places, filling the spaces with milkshakes and rest stops with playgrounds and people's dogs and mom's voice reading about charletons and the development of sanitation, about Civil War reenactors and sons of Anansi. When I was small we packed audiobooks with the big white CD player and black headphones. We never needed two. Dramamine knocks out Adam every time. Dad points out cows and horses and I see abandoned barns through the trees. I watch out the window for my favorite flowers, purple prairie clover, growing wild and free in the emptiness.