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Rooster and Nails refuse to acknowledge flyover country, that great pause between their birthplace and the city of their resettlement. Before I left, Rooster cautioned me to make sure my housing had indoor plumbing. Nails worried about the lack of kosher restaurants.

“Like I give a shit about eating kosher?” I said. I’d put in an obligatory phone call to her two days before I was scheduled to hop in my U-Haul and drive the puzzle parts of my life halfway across the country. My walls were up. She was still with Bill. What was the truth behind their relationship? Only her hairdresser knew for sure.

“You’re Jewish,” she said, “always.”

There was my mother: making an emotional deal out of something totally irrelevant. Jewish? We rarely if ever went to temple. Kosher? I was never bat mitzvahed. Always? Like she wasn’t eating trayfe right now, catering to him, not asking that he pay rent or get a job?

The walls were up. They always were when I heard her voice, when I saw her name in my Hotmail in-box. There was always the risk of trusting her. There was always the chance that I might come to her with another request for help. No.

Rooster laughed when I called to give him the news: “You have to go through this phase?” he said. “You couldn’t just become a Buddhist like other kids your age?”

“Meditation bores me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”