Aisha, still lying down, picks her up and holds her high above her in both hands. “Behold! The Porcupine of Truth!”

I sit on the grass and applaud. Aisha does a horizontal curtsy.

“On an unrelated note, do we need a new broom?” I ask.

“We might.”

“Well, clearly we must worship her.”

“Well, clearly.”

“What does one do to worship the Porcupine of Truth?”

“Good question.” She sits up, and a brown pine needle is stuck to her tank top. I want to be that pine needle. “Buy a new broom, possibly.”

“Of course, it is the Porcupine of Truth, so there is truth telling.”

“Of course,” she says.

“And if I recall correctly, there’s the Guacamole Festival.”

Aisha shakes her head. “I think you’re just hankering for guac, which is way different than an act of worship.”

“You’re breaking the rules. You aren’t supposed to deny my reality.”

She screws up her face at me, and I realize she doesn’t do improv comedy or know the rules, so I let it go.

“So there’s a thing,” I say.

“What thing?” she asks.

“A thing. I looked up that World Series my dad was talking about. It happened in 1982.”

“So?”

“So, that’s the thing. The form I saw, the divorce form, the one my dad said didn’t exist because his dad left one day and they never got divorced and no one ever heard from him again?”

“Yeah?”

“It was signed in 1983.”

Aisha is quiet for a bit. I glance over and she is biting her lip, lost in thought.

“Okay,” she finally says, slowly. “So what do you think that means?”

“It means my dad’s dad disappeared back in 1982. But my grandparents actually divorced in 1983.”

She nods a few times. “I mean, it could just be that they divorced by mail.”

“Right, but my dad has no idea about it.”

She chews on her lip a little more. “You heard your dad. He doesn’t care about this stuff.”

“Yeah, I don’t buy that.”

She seems to consider this. “So who could we ask about the divorce thing?” she asks.

“The pastor next door signed the form too,” I say. “He knows more than my dad does. That’s weird, right?”

“Oh good. A pastor.”

“You just want to meet a real, live pastor. Because of your deep love of religion,” I say, and Aisha says, “That’s exactly it.”

THE PASTOR IS watching the local news when we arrive, and he seems overjoyed to have company.

“Who’s your friend?” he asks me as he ushers us into his living room, which still smells like pinecones and old folks.

I introduce him to Aisha and we three sit down on his couch.

“You’re very striking,” he says.

Aisha bows. “Thank you, sir. It’s always been my life goal to bring a little taste of sub-Saharan Africa to central Montana.”

He clearly has no idea how to respond, so he says, “So are you from here, dear?”

She nods, not looking at him, and then we suffer through the world’s most awkward three-minute conversation about nothing. No topic is safe, and I can tell Aisha is thinking about turning “striking” into an action verb. Finally, thankfully, she asks if she can use his bathroom, and the pastor points the way down the hall.

“So I was actually wondering if I could ask you some questions,” I say once Aisha is gone.

“Of course,” he says, visibly relieved that it’s just the two of us.

“It’s about my grandfather. He was your friend, right?”

“Oh yes,” the pastor says.

“You have any idea where he would have gone?”

The pastor takes a deep breath and gives me a deeply sympathetic look.

“I really don’t,” he says.

“You never heard from him again after he left?”

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Did my grandparents ever, like, get divorced?”

He looks up and to the right, like he’s trying to remember.

“I don’t think so.”

“Huh,” I say.

He crosses his legs. “Your grandmother and I went through this same process, thirty years ago,” he says. “We tried everything. We wanted to understand what happened. Nothing panned out.”

“Nothing?”

He puts his head down and lets it hang there. “You have no idea how hard it was. For all of us. His … disappearance. Your grandmother … just about fell apart after. Your father, well. He took to drinking, even though he was just a kid, and he never got back on track. I know this all too well. Believe me. I wish I knew how to help. I’ve been trying to help all these years, but your father, he doesn’t want me around. I know that. I just … keep looking after him because I think Russ — your grandfather — would want me to. We’re family, Carson. I wish I could say the one thing to make it all better, but I simply can’t. Do you understand that?”

Aisha returns from the bathroom and comes to stand by my shoulder.

“I get it,” I say, wondering how to bring up the fact that I know about the divorce. And his signature. “And thanks. It’s just. There’s this one thing I —”

Aisha jams me in the back, and I stop talking. The pastor is waiting for me to finish.

“This one thing I … wanted to say. To you. Thanks,” I say.

“Yes,” Aisha says. “Thanks.”

He smiles, and our good-byes are even more awkward than the last time I saw him.

We walk back across his yard to our house. When we get down to the basement, I say, “What just happened?”

“I needed to get you to stop talking,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because,” she says, jutting her hands out wide. “He has one of your boxes. In his office. I opened the wrong door on the way to the bathroom, and I saw it.”

“What?”

“I saw a box that’s definitely one of your grandmother’s. This one had the same flood mark. That line across the bottom, about four inches up. I’ve seen that line. I swear to you. It’s one of the same boxes.”

I shake my head at her. “If there was a flood in this house, there was probably a flood next door.”

“Nope,” she says. “This one had an orange ‘2’ on it.”

My stomach drops. “While you were in the bathroom, I asked about the divorce. He said it never happened.”

“He lied,” Aisha says. “And this isn’t like one of those things he forgot.”

“How do you know?”

“The box. It was open. It was next to his desk chair, and it was open.”

We stay up late formulating a plan to get a chance to look at the box. It’s tough, because there’s no conceivable way to get Aisha and him talking while I sneak back to his office.

“Maybe you could do an exotic African dance for him?”

She shoots me a sideways look, and I realize that she can joke about race. I can’t.

We simply can’t come up with a way to get me in there.

“We need to see the box when he’s not around,” I say, and Aisha nods.

“How bad do you want to see it?” she asks.

“Pretty bad,” I say. “I mean, the fact that he’s actively lying is creepy.”

“Well. What if I told you we could get in without breaking and entering?” she asks. “Did he have an alarm system?”

“The dude doesn’t have a computer. I’m sure he wouldn’t know what do with an alarm system.”

“Up to you,” she says. “I have a feeling there’s an easy way to get in.”

I have trouble sleeping, and I wake up around three in the morning and curse myself for not having a glass of water nearby. I go upstairs and pour myself one, and I drink it by the light of the moon, next to the open window over the sink. I stare up at the gray-black Billings sky, barely lucid, and I let my eyes wander over to the pastor’s place, where, tomorrow — today, really — we will be entering-but-not-breaking. How? And what will happen if we get caught?