Dad went into to woods to look for wood, but Sandy says he won't find any that's not wet. It's raining in the middle of summer. They decided we should leave in summer because people are happier then and if the car broke down we'd be sure to find someone who'll help. All year we were thinking about June. I was, anyway. But this summer is all wrong. The sky is laughing it up, peeing his pants. Dad and Sandy fight too much and they've run out of weed too. Dad keeps stopping in these weird farmer towns in the middle of Kansas or Missouri and saying, "Damnit, why don't we just fucking stay here." I keep quiet and look out the window. When he's like that there's no point to talking.

"Jess - did you see that?" I'm lying on my back in the back seat of the Chevy listening to the rain on the roof. Sandy thinks every single thing is amazing. "I think there's a rat in that tree." It's a dumpy campground off a busy road. All the garbage cans are overflowing, beer cans and diapers swimming in puddles.

"They're called squirrels," I tell her.

"Don't sass. It's a rat or something."

"A possum?" I sat up and pulled myself into the driver's seat. Raindrops were running relay races down the windshield. Along the way, I've been studying the animals in each state and teaching lessons about them. We keep our eyes out for the weird ones. Dad's going to take us through Arizona and up through California for the coyotes. If we had possums in Connecticut, I never saw one. They're night people, like us.

Because of the weather we've been driving straight through the flat parts instead of going up higher. Dad's been driving all days then stopping us somewhere at dinner time, wherever we end up when I start to complain. Dinner's pretty much all we eat. And mostly it's cheapo stuff split up between us, or we stop at a store and have a picnic in the parking lot. We buy cheese and I let it sit by the heater vent so it gets soft and you can spoon it out with your fingers. Sandy lives on carrots and apples.

"Where is it?" I ask her. Pieces of her dirty blonde hair are caught up in her glasses - with one hand she's pulling her hair, with the other she's wiping the front window with Dad's sock. She's young for him, only twenty. But it keeps him laughing; he calls us his girls. And Sandy doesn't freak out. She chatters like a bird but she doesn't lose it. At least not yet, and that's saying something. Dad says she's a good role model for me. I can't say, after all I've seen, that I ever want to grow up to be a woman. I tell him that and he laughs. Sandy's okay though. "What about Carly Simon? Golda Meir? Mother Teresa?" He asks me. Old ladies, I tell him. Except Carly - but he already knows I like Carly.

"Sandy you have any peanuts left over there?" I ask her. She pulls a bag out of the glove box, mostly shells. I run outside and make a trail from the tree up onto the fender and then all along the windshield. The mud feels good between my toes - it's loose mud. The dirt here is thin and dusty. We're in Colorado and I've been saying it for days. Calaradi, Cohlohroro, I love the way it sounds and I wouldn't mind if Dad said we're quitting the trip right here. They've got black bears here, wolverines, giant ants, mountain lions, all kinds of snakes and all the aspen trees are connected by their roots underground. We've been playing our John Denver tape and singing along but Dad won't drive us up into the Rockies because of the road conditions. He's a chicken sometimes but the car is a piece of shit. My mother crashed it up too many times.

"You think you're going to catch a rat with peanuts?"

"How big did it look?"

"Big. And it had red eyes. It stared right at me. Maybe we shouldn't be here."

"Was it hanging upside down from the branches?"

"No. It ran up the tree."

"You're stoned."

"I wish."

That's the big deal thing with California. My uncle's got a farm now, a little piece of land in North San Juan. That's near the Sierra Nevada mountain range, some mountain lions, raccoons; Marty said he feeds the deer from his hands. There's even bears up in the mountains. There's an ashram Marty's doing a lot of business with. He called my Dad every week last year, just to describe what he was seeing out his front door. "The trees are so green," he never says hello, he just starts talking even if its me who answers. "I'm naked and no one cares, you know, it's dark and I can feel the stars on my skin," he told me once, some woman laughing in his ear in the background. He told me that there's a mountain there that's made up of crystals. He calls the place cosmic, and Marty's the cosmic cowboy. He really calls himself that; he even made up a whole song. He played it over the phone three times so we could each hear.

I don't believe much of what they say. Two years ago Dad thought we should move to New Zealand because he read something about how it would be the safest place after a nuclear blow up. He brought me books on sheep farming. Connecticut was a small state though, and you can only move so many times before nothing's new. Fifth state in the union, capitol Hartford (boring place), beavers, turkeys, turtles and frogs.

"Oh my God, Jess," Sandy whispers. She jerks her head at the window, still trying to untie her hair. There are five squirrels, fat grey ones, following my peanut trail.

"Is that what you saw?"

"I know I saw a rat. Are they going to climb on the car?"

"I hope so."

"Wow. I've never seen such fatties, have you?"

"No."

"Everything's bigger out here, isn't it Jess? I mean the trees, and the sky and everything. Can't you feel it - we're here. Colorado, then New Mexico, Arizona - "

"Coyotes."

"Yeah... coyotes... then the ocean." Sandy'd never been off the East coast. When they fought, Dad said he was just her prison break. She didn't deny that. She told me so, sometimes. She lived with some friends in Storrs, worked at the library putting books back in order. Her mother visited her on weekends and threw things at her - plants, silverware, dirty clothes. Sandy agrees with me about women being nuts.

I hear the sound of claws on metal. "Here they come," I say. Sandy squeals. She's like having a little sister sometimes.

Dad's out there in the woods wearing a garbage bag over his head. The first squirrel pulls itself up onto the hood and stands on its back feet, sniffing the air. I hope Dad gets back to see this. The thing looks right at us and then back down at his friends. "It's cool, man," the squirrel says. "They're alright."

"He's the leader," I say. "Making sure it's not a trap."

"Is it a trap?"

"You want me to catch one?"

"No, that would be evil." She says, but she looks at them the way she looks at babies. "Squirrels have rabies, anyway. We'll have to leave you here once you start foaming at the mouth."

"Shut up." I watch the head squirrel, his brown claws like sticks.

"What's his name?"

"Who?"

"Your leader."

"Emmet," I tell her.

"That's a weird name, Jess."

"Not as weird as Dharma."

"That means something." Sandy wants to change her name when we get to California. "What does Emmet mean to you?"

"That's just his name," I say. I know it is. Emmet looks at me and tilts his head, like I just said something he understood. "See?" I say. Then he turns around, because the next squirrel's tiny head is peeking up onto the hood.

"Oh my fucking god, that's the cutest," she says. "Alice," she says. "That's definitely Alice."

"You think they're together?"

"No, no way. Alice is his partner in crime, but it's strictly platonic with these guys."

"Are they a family?"

"The way we are, sure, thrown together." Sandy makes a hurricane with her hands. "Alice uses her looks," she says. "See how she's distracting us?"

"So he can hide all the stuff, right?"

Emmet's cheeks are so full, his nose is stretched out. He takes a step closer to the window and I touch the glass - he tries to gather my fingertip like a nut. The glass pisses him off; he pats it and turns back to Alice. "What the hell is this shit?" He says. Alice squinches up her nose and laughs.

Dad's been gone awhile. Sometimes I worry that he'll run off but then where would he go? I guess a man can go anywhere. He says he won't leave me, even if I tell him to. He just needs to take a break sometimes.

My mother threw herself in front of a car. She told me she would do it but I didn't believe her. She always made up stories about how she was going to do it, a new one every month. She's okay. I mean, she didn't die. But I never wanted to see her again after that. It was like she lied to me, by actually doing it. Dad says she was broken before any of us. I don't understand that. How does a person break, and walk around in the same skin and clothes, looking normal? She's stupid, I think. Stupid to hate her life.

There's the third squirrel.

"Vladimir?" Sandy asks. I shake my head. I'm licking a peanut shell with the tip of my tongue. "Stanley?"

"It's a girl, Sandy." I say.

"Really? With a face like that?"

This one's face is half covered with a dark spot, below the eyes that makes it look tough. Definitely a girl. I try to think of a name. Sandy starts yelling out Indian goddesses. "No, none of that stuff." I know I'm going to choke on all that when we get to the Ashram. The new squirrel walks right up to the glass, spreads her paws against it and peeks in at us. "Who are you?" She wants to know.

"Introduce yourself," I tell Sandy. So she holds out her thin hand and gives the squirrel her story - name, birth date, horoscope sign, mother's life story, belief in higher beings. She's trying to crack me up, but the squirrel isn't buying it. It stares in even harder. "C'mon," it says.

"No," I say. "She wants to know what we're doing here."

"Look at her," she says. "She won't give up, will she?" The squirrel sniffs the glass again and leans in a little closer. We can see the white crest on her chest, the fur flat up against the window. It's beautiful. "She doesn't even care about the nuts."

"Emmet got most of them anyway."

"So, tell her," Sandy says.

"Constance," I say. That's her name. "We're waiting for my Dad." Her tiny ears search the air. "We're driving across the whole godamn country," I say. "You want to come?" She smiles, but shakes her head. She looks from one to the other of us.

At night, when we stop the car, if the rain stops, we run around the towns pretending we live there. We peek into the windows and tell stories about our neighbors, the strangers who we'll never meet. I see kids leaning on their elbows looking at TVs, and old people standing still in doorways and parents touching knees on the couches. Mailboxes and porches and light poles and things that don't move.