Adina dreams. She looks at the magazines she’s spread on the coffee table: Texas Monthly, New Mexico Magazine, Sunset, Oklahoma Today, Arizona Highways. There are more. Most of them she hasn’t even opened. But she likes the fantasies of the glossy covers, the neon signs on Route 66, rivers twisting through the mountains, a lush desert campground. Just buying them made her feel better.

            She lives in Missouri now. Nice people, tall trees, winding hills. It snows here, in the Ozarks, and rains on a relatively predictable basis. But she wakes up from time to time, feeling claustrophobic because the trees lean in around her. And she gets seasick driving through the hills. She has picked up several nervous habits in Missouri: she bites her nails, clicks her pen incessantly, spends hours watching the Weather Channel. She sits on her porch at night, waiting to feel something coming on the air.

            Still, she waits until she’s called home, on a mission. “The house has split,” her father says. He calls from Oklahoma, a space between Sayre and Sweetwater, a space where the farm report is all that comes on the radio, where cell phones hunt pointlessly for signals.

            She knows what he means, but she says “You make it sound like the house packed up and left in the middle of the night.”

            He laughs. “It kinda did. We were laying in bed when we heard it. The whole north end of the house creaked and hung there for a second. Then the whole thing just sat down hard. Nearly knocked your mother out on the floor.”

            It had been coming for a long time. First the framing pressed its outline through the drywall. Tiny veins cracked the gray-painted walls of the living room. Then they grew. Adina helped her mother paint them shut. But they spidered open again over a series of nights one July. They painted them another time, and that time Adina leaned her weight against the framing that showed through, hoping she might push the wall upright. But another month passed without rain and the veins burst forth once more, forked and spread like wildfire, and her mother had said “Let’s just not look at them anymore.”

In a winter so dry that sparks ignited at the slightest touch, the ceiling in her parents’ bedroom cracked, too. The crack snaked open on a diagonal, and the two halves pulled away from each other in degrees until a hand could easily be slipped into the opening. A gap appeared between the kitchen cabinets and the wall behind them. Carpenter ants poured out at night and left their debris like treasure for her parents to find. The bathtub sank several inches. Doors began to drag on the floor when they were opened and closed. Windows tilted into some of the rooms so that the curtains sagged in the center. Her father, a master rigger, tested the limits of how many ways caulk, duct tape, bailing wire, and the odd piece of 2X4 can be used to repair a house. But it was clear now that the land had won. The house is coming down.

            Adina carries one of the magazines to her parents’ house. She wants to show her father an article about train trips through the Rockies and an advertisement for a kayak she wants to buy.  Her father is a dreamer, too.

*          *          *

            Adina drives seven and a half hours. The farther west she has come, the shorter and sparser the trees. She has driven from maple forests to mesquite washes. Just before Highway 152 crosses the interstate a coyote skips up from the brush. It heads west and runs ahead of her several yards before skipping down into the brush on the other side. The sun is big, it is the whole landscape. Adina breathes deep.

           

            People are gathered around her parents’ house, which is braced up on the north side with new yellow lumber and boarded over like a house anticipating a hurricane. It’s a furious endeavor at the temporary, saving the house until the contents can be safely hustled out, then tearing it down before the land can take it. Adina steps out of her car,  feels the salt in the air. Once in a class in college the professor asked her students to write about home. Adina wrote about the fruitwood table in the dining room, about condensation dribbling down glasses of iced tea, leaving marks on the table. She wrote about heat and wind that never, never stops blowing. And she wrote about the red clay  rings that stained all her socks between the meeting point of her shoes and her jeans. She did not write about this house, she realizes now.

            Her father introduces her first to people she already knows then to Jimmy, the man who has been helping her father keep the house propped up. She has heard about Jimmy over the phone, how Jimmy shored up the porch when the wall began to pull away. He is younger than she thought he’d be. Then Adina meets the man from the geological survey. He is dressed in nicer clothes than anyone else, as if he could not have anticipated the layers of silt he’d wear away from the site. Funny, Adina thinks.

Jimmy and his crew hammer up more bracing. The geologist explains shifting and tectonics and aquifers. It is all stuff Adina knows, that her father has told her. But the way this man says it sounds like a book so she listens.

            “And that’s about it, really,” he says. “There’s just not enough water left.”

            “We used that much water?”

            “Not you. Everybody. Never should have been farming out here.” He stands with his hands on his hips, looking toward Texas. “Highways. Horses. Never should have been people out here.”

            With that they all stand looking toward Texas, the view dotted at irregular moments by grainy mesquite. Except for the hammering, it is quiet. A punctuation of wind brings dirt falling on them like rain.

The man from the survey smiles, brushes a hand over his balding head, then examines the red residue on his palm. “They had big clouds like this in the Dust Bowl. Constant. They probably got up a couple of miles high sometimes. Some people say five, but . . .” He shrugs.

            Adina listens. The hammering echoes, but she can not fathom off what.

“Towns don’t just close down,” she says. “Don’t just fall into the earth.”

            “Out here they do.” 

 

            Adina wants to call someone, but she can’t think of anyone. The ground is cracking and splitting open, and the whole town is going to be gone. The whole town. It’s already happening.

 

*          *          *

            It was decided before they’d called her: her parents are moving into a place in Lawton, a housing development they call it, a retirement village. They have friends there, and the bus takes residents to Wal-Mart for free. Adina’s mission is not to assist in determining what comes next. She is here to sort and pack, to pick through the collected memories, to take what she wants to back with her. Her parents arrange boxes into ones marked “living room” and “kitchen.” Tickets to Las Vegas wait in her mother’s purse, a kind of pre-unpacking vacation, her father calls it.

Adina drives through town. At eleven she lived on the river, seined crawdads from the clay.  Her friend Melanie lived on a hog farm. “Wells out here go deeper than China,” her grandfather would say,  and everyone around him nodded and smiled. Adina looks at empty streets and thinks, there was no other choice.

 

            Packing begins. No one knows how much time they have, but  no rain is forecasted. A van of college kids arrives. The man from the geological survey has brought them. They pile out like tumbleweeds, spend hours standing over monitors, maps, and computers. Adina ignores them in the only way a person can ignore such an invasion, such an opening of one’s life. It is natural. They are all waiting.

 

Adina and her parents are instructed not to walk over the threshold into the third bedroom.

“We’ll try to knock this part off in one cut.” Jimmy smacks the length of one hand across the other palm. “If we get it off in one clean piece, you’ll probably find some stuff worth saving.” He lights a cigarette, the smoke caught in a fast wind before Adina fixes its direction. “Better than what you’d find after a tornado.”

“How many houses have you knocked down? Like this, I mean.”

Jimmy counts in his head. “This’ll make my sixteenth, but we done around thirty or so all told.”

Standing there, Adina studies the chaff collecting around her shoes. It is dusk, when the wind kicks up for a while. A pickup of people from town pulls down the road and slows by the mailbox. They are only the fourth vehicle today. The novelty of the earth swallowing up the little houses on the prairie has faded. It isn’t the house of her childhood, but just another house, the latest to go, not at all unexpected. The people in the pickup wave and drive on.

 

            Over the next few days, her father gives her things. None of them are things Adina would have chosen, but they all make a certain sense to her: a carpenter’s box of assorted hand tools, branding irons that had belonged to her grandfather, a large ceramic turtle whose shell opens to reveal hidden storage. There are four crumbling pink bricks from the school house at Tucker. Tucker is just a cemetery now, she thinks, or was the last she saw or thought of it. “I kept these because I was afraid nobody’d remember my  little school,” he tells her. He smiles at the memory but he doesn’t want the bricks. Adina agrees someone should have them, as old and delicate and hand-shaped as they are.  Adina does not question any of the gifts, even the ancient Peter Pan Peanut Butter jar containing a few rusted nails. This her father hands to her and says, “Just in case.”

            Adina places the things in her car and notices the magazine, the one with the trains and the kayak. She had forgotten it. In the upper right of the cover picture a train blurs around a blue mountain ripe with wildflowers. In the picture’s center a vacant highway follows the train’s path at an altitude farther south. And even farther south a river ripples into whitecaps, up and over glistening rocks. There are no people in the picture. Adina puts the magazine on the floorboard, a box on top of it.

 

            Her mother waves toward the pile of remaining odds and ends. “You got everything you want?” she says. She is dressed in a red track suit and slick white tennis shoes. She wears a matching fanny pack. She is already on her way to Vegas.

            “I got all the stuff Dad gave me. I don’t even know what to do with half of it.”

            “I don’t know why you took half of it.  It’s junk.”

            “Yeah.” Adina looks out at her car. It is the big day. Jimmy prepares to knock the house the rest of the way down. They are beating the earth to it. Only two of the college students remain, sitting in lawn chairs in front of a computer. “But it’s cool junk.”

            “Okay.” Her mother walks around the flat-bed trailer, testing the security of the rope holding her belongings down. “Then I think we’re done here.”

            On cue, Jimmy whistles. The college students, the geologist, and her father stand  semi-circle by the mailbox.  Her mother takes her father’s hand, the first time Adina has seen them hold hands in years, maybe her whole life.

            “On my count.” Jimmy hollers. The backhoe revs and the rest of Jimmy’s words are lost. But Adina sees his arm move, down in a cutting motion. Men with ropes pull, and the backhoe careens forward on the rocky ground.

            Like that it is over. A mushroom cloud surges upward, pebbles scatter across their shoe tops. The force of the house brushes around and beyond them like any other dirt devil. The ground trembles and only then does Adina realize she’s felt this a thousand times before. They take their hands away from their faces and unsquint their eyes. Shreds of wallpaper waft in the air. Adina smells flour.

            Her parents look sad, but not regretful. Jimmy and the geologist shake her father’s hand. The college students tumble back into the van. They all talk about leaving, about going new places, about driving away. Her parents aim east, toward Lawton.

            Her car sits, alone, tiny on the landscape. Though they haven’t moved from the site, Jimmy and his crew feel far away. The quiet is so immense that suddenly the piecemeal of her parents’ lives here, as it’s stuffed into her car, feels incomplete. Adina looks for the turtle, the bricks, the box of pictures her mother gave her yesterday.  She lights on the Peter Pan jar and shakes the nails out onto the ground.

            Adina grips the bottom of the jar and uses it like a drill, crushing open the layers of shale until she comes to the red clay. The clay looks wet, but she knows better. When Adina puts her fingers to it,  red dust spreads out a plume a foot high. She turns the jar and scoops down into the clay. Dust slips in and around the glass mouth, continues to spatter into the air, to pack under her fingernails. It coats her clothes and face, leaves a grit dancing on the fine tips of her eyelashes. She digs until she has it all, until it is all the jar will hold. She screws the lid down on the jar, hearing the clay grind in the threads of the jar’s lid.

            She carries the jar in her hand like she holds someone’s ashes. In the jar, the dirt feels solid, whole, like a thing.

            Write home, the professor had said, and Adina had done that. She wrote dirt. The condensation from the tea glasses is the only water she remembers.