“You think?” she asks.

“I know,” I say, and maybe the way I sound so sure makes her sure too, because she nods in agreement. “We have to go to Thermopolis and talk to those people. See what they know.”

She stretches her arms over her head. “Let’s do it. What’re you gonna tell your mom?”

“I have no idea,” I say.

I decide to take the journal, and Aisha says we have to take the Porcupine of Truth. We put these things on the ground next to the stairs. Neither of us can sleep much more, so we get up around five. I decide I’ll text my mom once we’re on the road, just in case she says no for once. Once we’re both showered, we creep upstairs so we can sneak out to the car without her or my dad seeing.

We’re all set to go around five thirty, and just as I close the passenger-side car door, my mom comes out the back door in her peach robe and slippers, her face so tense I can see the creases from ten feet away in the side-view mirror. She looks nothing like the calm woman who came down to the basement in crisis mode last night.

I get out of the car and salute her. Aisha gets out of the car too, and Mom waves to her tentatively.

“What’s going on, Carson?” my mother says, her tone clipped, controlled.

“Got stuff to do today,” I mumble.

She tenses her jaw and takes a deep breath. Then she puts her hand on my shoulder, which is apparently the official mother greeting. “Seeing your dad like that must have been very difficult for you,” she says.

At first I think she means my nighttime visit to his room, but then I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know anything about that. Pretty sure. “It was delightful,” I say.

She lowers her chin to her chest and speaks to my kneecaps. “I’m hearing a great deal of anger at your father. I want you to know that I know it isn’t easy for you to be here. I appreciate you coming to Montana, and I know that there will be a great deal of growth for you if you continue to be the bigger man.”

“Thank you,” I say, and my mother taps me on the shoulder twice like she’s my teacher and I just got a hundred on my sixth-grade geography test, like maybe I was the only one who knew where the fuck Botswana was. She goes back inside without asking, for instance, why we’re getting in the car at five thirty in the morning.

I look at Aisha and hold up a finger, telling her to pay attention. I cross to the house and open the back door. “Hey, Mom,” I yell. “We’re gonna head out to Wyoming for the day. Okay?”

A couple beats of silence, then she yells back, “Whatever you think, honey.”

“I’ll just use the card for any expenses, ’kay?”

Slight pause. Sigh audible from twenty feet away. “Sure, honey.”

Aisha gives me a quizzical look as I walk back to the car, like, Really?

I shrug. “Yep, that just happened,” I say.

And with that, the journey to find my grandfather begins.

THE PORCUPINE OF Truth perches precariously on the dashboard as Aisha pulls the Neon onto I-90 and starts us on our journey west and south from Billings.

The Porcupine is our new, prickly mascot. When Aisha makes a sudden stop at a yellow light, the porcupine lurches forward into the windshield and then off the dash into my lap.

“Ow,” I say, pushing her onto the floor. “Our God is a painful God.”

I recline in the passenger seat. When I take my shoes off, kick up my legs, and place my bare feet against the windshield, Aisha swats me in the biceps and says, “You crazy?”

I pull my feet away from the glass and see that I’ve left toe marks. I rub them and that just makes a smudge. She turns up Tegan and Sara, which is not what I would choose, but it’s not terrible. I find myself bouncing my head exaggeratedly to show her I approve, and then I stop because it’s like, Overcompensate much?

Conversation is tougher this morning. Maybe it’s that we’re stuck in a car for three hours, and that’s different from being in the same house, because in a house, you can always get away. Also, I’m not in a real jokey mood, what with the whole My dad is dying and last night he thought I was his dad thing, not to mention the My grandfather is still alive thing. But joking is what I do. So as we careen through the outskirts of Billings, the billboards on either side screaming for our attention, I look out the window and riff on whatever I see.

“Candy Town. The largest candy store in Montana. Do they get a medal for that?”

“It’s a cool store,” she says, almost defensive.

“I’m sure. Far be it for me to diss candy.” I keep scanning for more material. “Pelican Storage? Did someone really name their store Pelican Storage?”

“Apparently,” Aisha says.

“Is it for the storage of actual pelicans only? Or can you store other fowl there?”

“You want me to stop and ask?”

“I think they probably prefer only pelicans, but if someone has an osprey, or maybe a flamingo, even, they’re like, ‘Fine. So long as we don’t get to a point where we have fifty percent flamingos, we’re set. We don’t want to have to change our name.’ ”

“Right,” Aisha says, monotone. “All the new signs.”

I look over at her, grateful that she’s playing along. “What about the self-esteem of birds?” I say. “I worry about things like that. Like if you’re an osprey, you’re set. Everyone fawns all over you and you can hold your beak high. But if you’re a pigeon? Do you think pigeons have inferiority complexes?”

“Probably they do,” she says.

“Some of them walk around with their chests puffed out, but I think it’s a false pride.”

We exit onto a rural highway, and now we are entirely alone on the road. There is nothing remotely like this on the east coast. Not that I’ve seen, anyway. It makes me feel important, like, instead of being one of a million people to travel through the Lincoln Tunnel one day, I’m the only one on a lonely stretch of highway. Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing in New York? The thought that I matter?

Fifteen miles past Bridger, the first town we pass through with an actual stoplight, I spot a yellow deer sign surrounded by flashing lights.

“So that’s where flashing deer cross, I guess? Are they doe? A deer, a female deer? Do they flash for money?” I ask.

Aisha is lost in another world, because she doesn’t answer. Tegan and Sara melts into jazz explodes into the hip-hop sass of Janelle Monae, and ours may be the only car in all of Wyoming at this very minute in which Janelle Monae is playing. We let “Q.U.E.E.N.” envelop Aisha’s Neon. How cool would it be to be able to rhyme like that? So flawless and smooth and quick. And then I think about how she gets to go into a studio, and she gets do-overs. The recording we hear is her final cut. Maybe in life, most of us feel inferior because we compare our dress rehearsals to Janelle Monae’s final performance. If I could just broadcast the Best of Carson Smith, and erase all the thoughts that go flat, all the jokes that don’t go anywhere, maybe I’d be amazing too.

“So if you could create an app, any app, what would it be?” I ask.

“Is this where we’ve gone now? What happened to prideful pigeons and flashing deer?”

I laugh. “You gotta keep up,” I say. “My brain does this.”

“I think there are medicines for that.”

I look down at my fingernails. Is she trying to pick a fight? “If I had to create an app, it would be one where you give haircuts to feral cats, or maybe one where you chase witches around a plant nursery. If I had to create a reality TV show, it would be called America’s Next Top Podiatrist. Contestants would face increasingly bizarre and disgusting foot diseases.”