"DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?" Lori asked me.
"Of course I do!" I said. "Don't you?"
"Sure," she said.
It was late afternoon, and we were parked outside of a bar in the Nevada
desert. It was called the Bar None Bar. I was four and Lori was seven.
We were on our way to Las Vegas. Dad had decided it would be easier,
as he put it, to accumulate the capital necessary to finance the Prospector
if he hit the casinos for a while. We'd been driving for hours when he
saw the Bar None Bar, pulled over the Green Caboose—the Blue Goose
had died, and we now had another car, a station wagon Dad had named
the Green Caboose—and announced that he was going inside for a quick
nip. Mom put on some red lipstick and joined him, even though she
didn't drink anything stronger than tea. They had been inside for hours.
The sun hung high in the sky, and there was not the slightest hint of a
breeze. Nothing moved except some buzzards on the side of the road,
pecking over an unrecognizable carcass. Brian was reading a dog-eared
comic book.
"How many places have we lived?" I asked Lori.
"That depends on what you mean by 'lived,'" she said. "If you spend one
night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a
whole week?"
I thought. "If you unpack all your things," I said.
We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn't
remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had
lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars.
"What do you think would happen if we weren't always moving around?"