All I Have in This World Read Online Free

he’d managed to hide from the bank. And, far more importantly, from his sister, who deserved the money far more than the bank did. Marcus cranked his window down and let the desert wind blow the thick drift of receipts and bills lining the dash onto the seat beside him, the floorboard. A few flew out the window, but he wasn’t littering. Let this breeze wipe clean at least this dash. Who would come upon the remnants of his failure in this backcountry untrammeled by humans? But Marcus was not naive enough to think that the desolation into which he sped was nothingness. More the sweet beginning of something else.

Wentzville, Missouri, 1983
    In the break room of the Buick plant, they called Brantley “Preacher.” Not just Brantley but everybody who worked on the line in Marriage, fitting chassis to body. “How many you guys marry this morning already?” they’d say to him, and he’d say, “Like I’m counting,” and they’d say, “Sounds like Preacher-man has got tired of tying knots,” and then someone would point out that he alone out of his team of four wasn’t married, and someone who knew him from high school (for half his graduating class from Wentzville had ended up on the line at the plant, wasn’t anything else to do except make the hour drive to Saint Louis and find some other manufacturing job that maybe paid a little more, but you’d eat up any profit in gas) would say, “When you and Carmen getting married?”
    This question made Brantley do something with his face. He would try to smile but he felt like what happened with his mouth was fixed somewhere between smirk and wince. Which was dangerous because Carmen’s dad worked on the line and so did two of her four brothers, and he never knew who was in the break room because it was half the size of his high school cafeteria. He kept his head down, didn’t talk much during lunch, sat most of the time with Arthur from his team, even though he knew some people made fun of him for eating lunch with a black dude. What the hell, it was 1983. Sometimes Brantley would say something to Arthur, and it was always about work, but Arthur didn’t like to talk about work. He liked to eat when he ate and that made Brantley eat his sandwich and his chips and drink his Coke in, like, five minutes so he could wait in line for a pay phone in the hallway by the bathrooms and call Carmen if she had worked the night shift and was hanging out at home.
    Carmen worked at Long John Silver’s. The apartment she shared with Cindy Dakeris smelled like fried fish. Carmen’s hair did, too. Her skin sometimes. Cindy was always complaining about it. “At least you could get work at Wendy’s, I like the way their fries smell.” Cindy was a big girl and so dumb that when she got high she got smart. Or smarter. Brantley and Carmen loved to get her high because she would watch a commercial for laundry detergent and say something really surprising about it. Other times she’d go on about stupid shit. Carmen and Brantley spent most of their time in Carmen’s room, anyway, listening to music, turning it way up so Cindy couldn’t hear them fooling around. Carmen always got furious when Cindy said she stunk up the apartment. She would go into her room and slam the door. She was just working there to save up money for community college. They were going to move to Saint Louis after Christmas. “It isn’t like working at Long John’s is my life’s dream,” Carmen would say. “No one wants to smell like this.” She loved to complain about her job, but that didn’t mean she wanted Cindy even to mention it.
    One night she said, “You know what’s like the grossest thing ever to me?”
    â€œMe?” Brantley was stretched out on the bed, waiting for her to shed her uniform.
    â€œShut up,” she said. “Tartar sauce.”
    â€œWhat is it,