And she knows that she is not seven, even though the world rushing past outside the Pontiac’s open windows is too fresh, the sunlight and colors of the Mississippi countryside much too brilliant, to have filtered through her twenty-four-year-old eyes. She knows that it’s November and not the week before her eighth birthday at the end of May.The warm breeze through the windows smells like new hay and cow shit, a faint, syrupy hint of the honeysuckle tangled in the fences that divide pastureland from the henna ribbon of the unpaved road. Dust spins up off the tires and hangs like orange smoke in the morning air behind them; hard gravel nuggets pop and ping off the underbelly of the Pontiac.“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, and her dad looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Not much farther. You don’t want to go in the ditch, do you?”“I can wait,” she says, isn’t sure if she’s telling the truth, not after two strawberry Nehi’s from the styrofoam cooler in the backseat floorboard.
