Taylor is quiet for a long time, watching her mother and her daughter through the scratched glass of the telephone booth. They’re working off steam in a playground across the highway while Taylor makes her call and Barbie attends to her cuticles. Turtle is in the swing, and Alice is trying to teach her how to pump. Turtle does the right moves, pulling back on the chains and kicking out her legs, but she does them at the wrong time and the swing goes nowhere.

There are things the mind can learn but the body will only do when the time is right.

“What else, Jax? Is there anything more?” Taylor asks.

Behind the phone booth is a gas station and, some distance away, a middle-aged man with longish hair leaning on his red sports car, apparently waiting to use the phone. Taylor doesn’t care that he’s waiting. Probably he stayed out all night gambling and is thinking up some excuse to tell his wife.

“Any more to the letter? No.”

“I wish I could read it. I can’t tell if I’m hearing it right. What does it mean?”

“I think this letter is about Gabriel Fourkiller, the boy who got lost.”

“But the Social Welfare Department thing, that part about legal action. Does that mean I have to talk to the guy or else?”

“Taylor, sweetheart, I don’t think so, but I don’t know.

You decide.”

“I can’t think straight.”

Turtle has finally gotten herself going in an acute zigzag.

Alice catches the chains and straightens her out a little. Tall pines shade the playground area, and the park beyond them is empty save for a heavenly field of green grass, probably the envy of every cow forced to graze in the state of Nevada.

“I took your suggestion, I’m working on the song about the Twilight Zone of Humanity,” Jax says, trying for cheerful but sounding like he’s trying.

“Jax, did you pay the rent yet?”

There is a pause. “In services rendered.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I have to tell you something.”

Taylor watches Turtle jump out of the swing and run for the slide. She seems, physically, happy. “You know what, hang on, I’m going to go get Mama. I want you to read that letter to her. She’ll know what it means.”

“Taylor, I’m crazy in love with you,” Jax says, but Taylor has dropped four more quarters in the slot and dashed across the highway, leaving the phone dangling.

Taylor sits in one of the swings; Barbie has gotten out of the car, stretched conspicuously, and ambled across the road to come and sit in the other swing. Turtle is collecting pop tops out of the dust and carefully bending the tab of each one into the ring of the next, making a chain. She says it’s a necklace for Mary. Probably the most beloved utility flashlight of all times, Mary already possesses a baby bottle and some doll clothes, which naturally don’t fit all that well. Taylor has offered to buy her a real doll, but Turtle is offended by the suggestion. She has accumulated yards of pop-top necklace by now and is dragging it behind her, looking like an escapee from a chain gang. Alice has been on the phone a long time.

Barbie’s skirt has lost some of its flounce. Her poodle bangs flip up and down as she rocks in the swing. Taylor finds herself looking at this woman a lot, trying to find the hidden casino robber in the picture.

“What time is it? You guys are like, E.T. phone home on this vacation. Why does your mother have to talk to your boyfriend? If my mother ever talked that long to my boyfriend, then for sure I’d know she had the hots for him.

No offense. I mean, Alice doesn’t seem like the type.”

Taylor sits quietly for a while under the rain of Barbie’s chatter. Then she says, “I don’t know how to bring this up, but Mama and Turtle and I are not on vacation, and you’ve got something besides blusher in your purse.”

Barbie looks at the black pocketbook in her lap, as if it had suddenly been flung there from an asteroid belt, then back to Taylor. “How do you know what’s in my purse?”

“We looked. We invaded your privacy when you were asleep last night.”

“Snoops.” Barbie kicks out her pink boots and drifts in the swing.

“I was just curious why you always had to take it to the bathroom with you. If you’d left it sitting in front of my nose, believe me, I wouldn’t have had the slightest desire to look in your purse.”

“So? Okay, so I’ve got money in there.”

The man with the red sports car sits on the front fender and crosses his arms, impatient to make his call.