The town of Curly had a single billboard, a faded, wind-wavering sign welcoming motorists to the Sandhills town of two hundred and forty-seven residents. There had been a complementary billboard on the opposite edge of town, but a twister had churned through decades ago, obliterating the sign.

The worst thing about my condition was the insomnia, the inability to get a good night’s sleep. I would go to bed early in the evening, exhausted by the torments of the day, and would promptly fall asleep, but by three o’clock in the morning I was fully awake again.

I refused to greet silver-haired mourners or point teary-eyed people toward the casket or absorb touching stories about Mona. Instead, I stayed glued to a metal folding chair at the front of the room, twirling my hair, staring at my mother’s waxy, shriveled body.

Delwyn nodded to the woman as he walked from his allocated parking space. She was leaning against a directional sign, her legs crossed at the ankles in a pose of inappropriate insouciance, a cigarette paused between her fingers, her face wreathed in a fine gray ash. He thought it unseemly for women to smoke and certainly not a good look for the hospital.

Robbie Crossman was five when his mother, Sally May, told him Bible stories, but her stories were different than those he heard in Sunday School. Instead of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, her stories were about Robbie himself and his parents. Even at a young age, he knew the place they lived wasn’t Judea; it was Indiana, and Indiana was in America.

I had a reputation for having a surly temperament. The surliness was a defense to the constant beratement from my father and his group at the club. I kept being told I was wrong, but I knew better. They were wrong. They lived in a wealthy bubble, protected from the real world where problems wandered the streets and seeped into the homes and apartments…