Text copyright © 2022 by Joyce Maynard

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781662508202 (digital)

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

Cover image: © leonovo / Alamy Stock Photo; © Dixi Lee / Shutterstock

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The story you hold in your hands is a work of fiction. The characters who appear on these pages are not real people. While I found inspiration in popular culture－the current American obsession with social media and fame in particular－the names, characters, events, and incidents appearing in this story are products of my imagination.

REPORTER

Just minutes ago, in a press conference outside the entrance to Big Cypress Swamp, Collier County Chief Rick Pettigill announced the suspension of all search efforts underway in the twenty-five-thousand-acre preserve to locate the body of twenty-four-year-old Kevin Canner, who disappeared nine days ago from his parents’ South Florida home for what was to have been a short hike in the swamp. The sole person of interest in the murder of his girlfriend, Tammy Partridge, age twenty-three, Canner is now believed to have taken his own life.

In the words of Chief Pettigill, the prospect of locating Canner’s remains appears unlikely, given the presence of an active alligator population in the swamp. In a surprising development, however, investigators on the scene have now located a backpack believed to belong to the deceased suspect. As of now, detailed information concerning its contents has not been disclosed, but law enforcement authorities have confirmed that before ending his life, apparently by gunshot, Canner left a final statement on his cell phone, discovered in the backpack this morning by none other than Canner’s own mother, who recently joined the search for her missing son.

Before his disappearance, Canner had returned home, solo, from what had been portrayed on social media as the trip of a lifetime with Partridge. The two had been pursuing careers as internet influencers, traveling across the country in a camper van, posting extensive videos along the way. Partridge’s body was discovered in the Utah wilderness last week. Her cause of death was reported as strangulation.

In today’s press conference, Chief Pettigill addressed the disturbing absence of Kevin Canner’s actual body. “That’s how it goes with gators,” he stated. “They’ll chow down every bite of flesh they can sink their teeth into. When that’s gone, they go for the bones.”

As of now, there has been no further comment from the Canner family. Meanwhile, at the Partridge home, hundreds of fans from all over have made their way to the area to hold vigil and post tributes to the murdered woman who captured America’s hearts in her few short weeks of social media fame.

We’ll be reporting back as more information becomes available. The couple’s five million followers await Kevin Canner’s final words on the tragic end of what seemed, for an all-too-brief few weeks, like a real-life fairy tale, played out on Instagram.

KEVIN

What do you need to know?

My name is Kevin Canner.

Sometime soon, in an hour or so, I’m going to kill myself. After, people are going to say a lot of things about me. I’m recording this now to set the record straight. I just hope my battery holds out long enough.

First off, I did it. I killed Tammy Partridge. There you have it. In a million years, I never expected to say those words.

In case you can’t tell from the sound of my voice, there’s tears streaming down my face at the moment. To think that I’ll never get to see her again. With Tammy gone, I can’t go on living.

LORRAINE

My son, a suicide. I could never have imagined him doing something like that. But a broken heart does terrible things to a person.

KEVIN

You wouldn’t expect a guy to say this when he’s standing on the edge of a mosquito-infested swamp with a gun in his hand, but I’ve always been lucky. In high school they voted me the guy most likely to still have a six-pack at our tenth reunion. (Abs or beer, take your pick.) If you ask my mother, I could’ve been the next host on Jeopardy! or president of the United States. I have 4,864,876 followers on Instagram. You know the first thing I thought, when I saw that number this morning? If only Tammy knew. That was her dream.

In case you’re thinking I come from some kind of messed-up family that neglected and abused me, think again. My dad works in real estate. My mom’s your basic homemaker. I’ve got one younger brother that basically just spends his whole life, 24-7, sitting in front of his computer. Henry’s some kind of computer genius super-nerd. The two of us probably haven’t said more than two sentences to each other since we were little kids. There’s nothing to say about him. In our family, Henry barely exists.

My parents would do anything for me. Ask my mom, she’ll tell you where the sun rises and sets. Wherever I’m at. When I started getting bummed out about losing my hair back in high school, she told me that, in her opinion, bald men were the sexiest. She mentioned some old guy named Telly Savalas. Whatever.

Then there was Tammy. Everybody loved her. We were going to have this great future together. She was my soul mate. Our life was basically perfect.

ROGER

For a while there, my wife was under the impression our little girl had found her dream match. If you ask me, there was always something off about him.

KEVIN

So I know what you’re probably thinking. How could a guy that much in love with a girl do something so terrible? All I can tell you is, I never meant to hurt Tammy. The thing I’ve kept bottled up inside—and it’s killing me—is that even the most wonderful girl in the world can get on your nerves sometimes. Not to speak ill of the dead, and of course she was a totally awesome person, but if I’m going to be honest . . . god, it’s hard saying this out loud . . . Tammy had issues. Anxiety disorders. She’d get so emotional, especially at certain times of the month. She counted on me to keep that part of her in check. She used to say, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Kevin. I’d be a basket case.”

That’s what I was doing, basically. Trying to protect Tammy from her own self. She’d start flailing her arms around, crying, saying all these crazy things. I was just trying to calm her down, but I guess I didn’t know my own strength.

I’m not giving a bunch of excuses for what I did. I could tell you shit happens, but I want to go deeper. Like Tammy was always saying about our Instagram posts, I want to be real.

Nothing I say here is going to bring her back. I just wish I could get a do-over of the last three weeks. I wish I’d never heard of Instagram. I wish people could believe I’m not this terrible person. I’m a good person that made a terrible mistake and I’m willing to pay for it.

That’s why I’m standing here with the gun, about to say goodbye to the world.

ROXANNE

You probably wonder why a person like me would’ve got caught up in this Kevin and Tammy business. So here comes the truth. The story of my life, as told on my brand-new YouTube channel.

For reasons that will become clear once you hear my story, I’m concealing my voice. Some people pay the big bucks for a machine that does this but I’ve always been the crafty type. I made my own, following the instructions of a friend of mine. Same guy who showed me how to post this without giving away my true location.

I have to conceal my identity, naturally, but take it from me, you’re not missing anything, not seeing my face. The little rascal you’re seeing on camera, trotting along up ahead, chasing waves, is my Havanese, Valerie. The best friend a gal could have. As for our location: let’s just say the beach where Valerie and I are making this video is not located in the continental United States.

Stay tuned and I’ll give you the full lowdown. And by the way, have you ever seen a more adorable pooch?

I used to be a nobody. Never posted on social media. You think anybody out there wants to see a Jenny Craig dropout in polyester pants cutting up cardboard boxes at an Amazon warehouse?

Now they will. Because I’m the only one that knows the truth about Tammy and Kevin. Not that I intend to go public with my identity, mind you. I’m not looking to monetize any of this. I just want to get the word out. My one goal is justice, plain and simple, and any fool knows you can’t count on law enforcement to provide it. I’m what you might call a DIY enforcer and champion of sweet, innocent, vulnerable women everywhere, because I used to be one myself.

Before the Kevin and Tammy story went down, I worked in fulfillment. Funny, right? You tell me: Where’s the fulfillment in taking boxes down off a warehouse shelf and loading them onto a cart to process an order? Do it eight hours a day—twelve, in holiday season—and you dream of boxes. I get this nightmare sometimes where there’s a conveyor belt and all these boxes are coming at me. As fast as I take them off the belt, I can’t keep up. Boxes keep tumbling off. Car seats, blenders, dolls, toaster ovens, cribs, microwaves. They just keep coming. Welcome to my life in fulfillment. Not to be confused with my fulfilling life.

My dog, Valerie, who is twelve years old now—she’s been the one good thing. I consider her my family. When I’d come home from work, she’d be the one I talked to about my day. Other than Valerie, you’re talking four walls and a TV screen.

When I was on break, my boss would ask why I couldn’t stop checking my phone. It wasn’t that anyone ever called me. Every chance I got, I’d go to Instagram to see what was happening with the people I followed. The influencers. I never met any of them, but when somebody’s posting about their activities three times a day, you start to feel you know them. They’re almost like friends. Unlike me, they were out there pursuing all these interesting hobbies like stained glass and growing their own mushrooms or studying Italian or improving their lives by learning to play the harmonica or going on the Keto diet or explaining how to apply makeup that makes it look like you have cheekbones, even if you don’t, by putting blush on the apples of your cheeks. I didn’t even know my cheeks had apples, but I watched.

My favorite IG posts are about dogs. Second favorite: the ones people put up about having all these fabulous adventures. I’m not talking about some couple going on their honeymoon to Hawaii and taking surfing lessons or some retirees celebrating their anniversary in Branson, Missouri. The influencers I used to favor went to amazing places all the time, where it’s a way of life. These people inspired me. They influenced me to feel maybe I could do something besides fulfilling orders. They gave me hope that my boring life could be different.

Most people that follow influencers go for the ones with ten thousand, a hundred thousand, two million people checking up on their every move. I’ve always been about supporting the underdog—the little guy that’s never going to hit the big time. If they’re putting out all this effort, it seems like somebody should be cheering them on.

That person is me, and no big surprise why. I’m the original underdog. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but there was a time when I had big dreams of my own. When the last of those was gone, that’s when I started following Kevin and Tammy.

KEVIN

I met Tammy on Tinder. She was working at a vet’s office, cleaning cages and walking dogs. I was living at my parents’ place, between jobs, watching inspirational videos to develop my business game plan. How can your dreams come true if you don’t figure out what they are? Not enough people understand this: if you want to go big, you have to plan big first. I was in the planning stage.

Our first date was at a TGI Fridays. She was super cute. Offered to split the bill, but I covered it.

That first night, she told me about her plan for becoming an influencer, and the road trip. She’d studied all these other people having incredible experiences and getting companies to pay for them, like how skateboard manufacturers sponsor skaters.

“You know what would be really great?” she said. “Going cross country with somebody else, as a couple. That would be a great hook.”

“I love traveling,” I told her.

“You’re probably tons more experienced than me,” she said. Not that I was, unless you counted all those Disney trips with my parents and my brother.

We started going out. Nothing heavy, just fun. One time we were in an elevator, going up to a rooftop bar, and the power went out. That’s the first time I saw one of Tammy’s panic attacks. To hear the girl’s screaming, you would have thought someone was strangling her.

Bad comparison. Never mind.

This is the kind of thing I mean when I say Tammy had a troubled side to her. Not that I’m judging. But this is one part people didn’t understand. She wasn’t always this perfect person like everybody thought. Sometimes she could be a little . . . unstable.

But everybody liked Tammy. She loved puppies and mango smoothies and yoga. She particularly loved rainbows. She had a collection of rocks shaped like hearts and sometimes she left one for me in some weird place like my sneaker or my sweatshirt pocket. John Legend made us both cry. We were both passionate about people not littering. I like to wear a bandanna on my head. She said it made me look like a pirate, but in a good way.

I kissed her on our second date, but it didn’t progress to anything more. On our fourth date she told me about her plan to stay a virgin till she was married. She mentioned this reality show she watched called Married at First Sight, where the two people got matched by a team of experts and didn’t even meet each other until their wedding day, up at the altar. Not that this was us, but she thought that was super romantic.

I didn’t make a big deal of this at the beginning, mostly because I didn’t take her concept of holding out all that seriously. It’s not like I was some horndog that just wanted to screw around with her. If she wanted to go slow, I could deal with it. I wanted to get to know Tammy on a personal level, bonding and so forth. I figured the sex part would come. I was patient.

We were taking a bike ride this one time—that’s the kind of thing Tammy liked, wholesome outdoor activities—when she laid out her plan. “I did a vision board,” she told me.

She loved working with the animals, but she didn’t want to let another summer go by without launching her career. “We’re not getting any younger,” she said. Then she made a joke I didn’t find very funny, about me losing my hair already.

Tammy had done all this research about being an influencer. She figured a couple like us, if we posted a few times a day from interesting scenic locations, with inspirational quotes and health tips and yoga, should be able to attract all these followers.

“Think of all the lives we could change by spreading our message,” she told me. I wasn’t all that sure what our message actually was, but it sounded good to me. Not just the inspirational angle, but the free stuff, like going to spas and resorts and getting to go wakeboarding and four-wheeling and—who knew?—maybe paragliding, without having to pay for it. Companies would give us products to try for free—yoga pants and sneakers and body butter, the works.

For me, with my background in business from the videos I watched, the trip was like a good career move, combined with an interpersonal relationship. For Tammy, bottom line? I hate to say this, but I think she just wanted to be famous.

The plan was we’d head out at the beginning of summer, posting on Instagram with all these hashtags—#camperromance and #loveinnature. Tammy’s plan was to do yoga every morning. We’d eat super healthy, read spiritual books—maybe not the whole book, but enough to post a quote every day from the best parts. We’d camp out in national parks and go hiking, keep a journal—things that were going to make us better people, according to Tammy. Mindful, that was her word for it. We didn’t talk that specifically about getting married after, but that was the general idea, and when we did we’d be super evolved, not to mention we’d have all these great memories.

I’ve never been the type to promote myself, but Tammy loved this kind of stuff. She told me all these ideas she had about cute things we could do together, like standing on our heads or having fights with squirt guns. By the time we hit the Rocky Mountains, we’d have thousands of followers. Millions maybe. People would ask us for selfies. We’d get sponsorships. It all sounded great.

First off, we needed a vehicle. Tammy did the research. She figured out that the van we should buy was a Sprinter that cost $40,000. Once we were influencers, we’d get rich. That’s how I put it to my mom and dad when I asked them to front the loan.

“You have to picture what we’ll be taking in with endorsement contracts,” I told my dad. Not to mention if there was a book deal down the line. Maybe even a reality series. When you looked at it, buying the van was basically a business investment. Like I told my parents, odds were the manufacturers would replace the van we bought first with a more upscale model, once we reached our first fifty thousand followers. That’s how it goes when you’re an influencer.

LORRAINE

It took a while, but I talked my husband into giving the kids the Sprinter van. Not that I didn’t have reservations about her. I’m talking about Tammy. But our son laid it all out for us, and I was proud of him for being such a go-getter. He was going to make a name for himself on social media.

FRED

I don’t get it. What’s social about social media anyway? Everybody’s off by themselves, looking at their phone. If you ask me, that’s antisocial media.

LORRAINE

The man’s a dinosaur.

KEVIN

We took delivery on the Sprinter that May, ten days before we were due to take off. My mom bought me a Marlins key ring and a baseball cap that said “California or Bust.”

You should have seen Tammy, setting everything up. She dropped a week’s paycheck at Bed Bath & Beyond, buying all these little storage containers and a label maker to make it so we could find everything. Toiletries, resistance bands, yoga mats, essential oils, her watercolor set, her stuffed rabbit from when she was little. Her tarot cards.

I brought my favorite hoodie. My mom packed an inhaler for me—not that I have asthma but just in case—and an EpiPen if I got stung by some kind of rare insect and it turned out I was allergic.

Tammy never cared that much about clothes or fashion. But there was this one item that meant a lot to her. The day we got the keys to the van, I’d given her a necklace—a gold chain with an amethyst heart. Her birthstone. She told me she was never going to take it off.

Tammy’s dad, Roger, was worried if she was going to be safe out in the wilderness. “I don’t know, Tam,” he said. “There’s crazies out there. Beautiful girl like you, gallivanting around in the woods. You could get yourself in serious trouble.”

“Well, she’s got Kevin,” her mom, Deb, reminded him. I could tell they weren’t wild about their daughter making the trip with me, but when Tammy got an idea in her head, nobody was stopping her.

In the end, it was actually my folks who had the hardest time with me taking off on the trip. My mom made me promise we’d call every night from whatever campsite we ended up at.

“There might be times when we don’t get cell service,” I told her.

“If anything ever happened to you,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to go on living.”

ROXANNE

Will you look at Valerie with that piece of seaweed, the way she whips it around like it’s a live animal she’s planning to eat for dinner? Havanese might look like they’re just little and cute, but take it from me. My girl can break the neck on a small animal if she wants to. Or something larger. Have you seen the teeth on her? I’ll tell you one person who did, eventually. Kevin Canner.

It was just plain luck, how I found those two. Maybe because I always wanted to travel someplace—and with the exception of that trip to Los Angeles, I never did—and because I’ve always been a sucker for a love story, I typed in the hashtags #sprintervan and #inlove.

A few dozen of these Instagrammer types popped up in my feed. Then I spotted Tammy, wearing this pair of goofy overalls and doing a cartwheel on a beach. Their Instagram handle was @kevinandtammylove. They had four followers. With me, they had five.

In the beginning, Kevin seemed like a nice enough guy. He told the story of buying Tammy a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone on their second date and when she got some on her chin he wiped it away with a kiss. In one of their first posts, he shared a poem he’d written for his mom. He mentioned he loved Minecraft, which happened to be a passion of mine too.

I even liked it that, though he was in reasonable shape, I could tell from their pictures that he was prematurely bald and it probably bothered him. He was always wearing some goofy bandanna that didn’t really cover it up. That made him seem vulnerable.

The one I cared about was Tammy. She was cute of course, but she never acted full of herself. She seemed like the kind of person who believed everything people told her, even if they were a total scam artist loser. Even—excuse my French—if they were an asshole. Tammy was the type of person who expects people to be good all the time, because that’s the way she was herself, and it would never occur to her that anybody else would be different. I could relate.

Plus, Tammy was a dog person. Before she and Kevin took off on their road trip, Tammy worked for a veterinarian. In one of her posts, she wrote about a golden retriever someone brought in that got hit by a car and had to be put down, and how she cried all night, after. I knew if she ever met Valerie, it would be love at first sight and the feeling would be mutual. One thing about Valerie: she has this instinct for knowing who the good people are. And who’s trouble.

KEVIN

Given that Tammy was basically—no offense—an airhead when it came to money, I took charge of our budget. I made a spreadsheet with different categories like “Food,” “Gas,” “Park passes and campground fees,” et cetera. Tammy’s approach was basically “money isn’t important.” She’d buy a package of granola without even looking at the price. “Once we’re famous, everything will be free anyway,” she told me. Until that happened, though, somebody had to keep an eye on how much was in the kitty, and that person was me.

We hit the road on Memorial Day weekend. We’d chosen the northern route on account of how hot it was going to get once summer hit. I wanted to see Mount Rushmore. Plus, we were stoked to check out Bryce Canyon and the Tetons. Crater Lake. The good part was that, in addition to getting famous, we’d be influencing all our followers to get out and explore nature while working on their relationships and their, you know, spirituality. This was Tammy’s take on the whole thing.

We posted our first video from St. Pete Beach. Tammy did a couple of cartwheels on the sand. I demonstrated how I liked to stir blueberries into my yogurt to provide antioxidants. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives,” I said. I got that from a sweatshirt of my mom’s. Tammy quoted a saying from a refrigerator magnet she had about following your dreams.

From St. Pete we moved on to Cape Canaveral. I took a cool picture of Tammy next to a rocket. The way I set that picture up, I was thinking that one might pick us up a bunch of followers.

Before we went to bed that night, we checked to see how the rocket post was doing. We had twelve likes. My mother and her book club, most likely, plus Tammy’s mom and dad and her little sister.

“It may take a little while for people to start finding us,” Tammy said. She was reading a book on her Kindle about how to grow your business as an influencer. I’ve got to hand it to Tammy: that girl had ambition. It could get on your nerves sometimes, all the expectations she had. Like if I wanted to chill out on a hammock sometime, she’d stand there next to me, doing sit-ups or jumping jacks and making suggestions for gaining followers.

“It’s important for us to post three times a day, minimum.” She shared this quote where you were supposed to ask yourself if a tree fell in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, did that even happen? I didn’t get what she was talking about, but it had been a long day, so I just said, “Word,” and left things at that.

ROGER

My wife and I were standing in the driveway, naturally, to see the two of them off.

There was this one moment there, right before they got into the van, when we were taking their picture. He was wearing one of those bandannas, and he leaned over to give her a kiss. For a split second, I could see my daughter flinch. He had his hand around her waist. She got this look on her face. She picked up his hand and moved it, same as she would if there was a piece of plastic wrap lying around. He put his hand in his pocket.

I looked at Deb, but she hadn’t noticed. I almost said something. I wanted to tell Tammy, “Are you sure you want to go off with this guy? You can change your mind.”

It all happened so fast. They got into the van and all we could hear was loud music blasting. That was the last we ever saw of our girl.

ROXANNE

Something Tammy said in one of their first posts really got to me: “We hope you’ll come along with us on our journey.” What she was talking about was getting people to start following them, of course. But that gave me another idea.

What if I didn’t just follow them on my phone like everyone else? What if I followed them in real life?

Some people, when they have a dream, just let it sit there for a few years—or all their life, possibly. That’s not me. Two days after Tammy posted her message about joining them on their road trip, I quit my job at the fulfillment center. One quick trip to Cabela’s and I had myself a sleeping bag, tick removal kit, headlamp, Taser gun for if I ran into a bear, and a real gun if I got into bigger trouble. I got a new traveling bed for Valerie and stocked up on her favorite chow and threw in a chew toy shaped like a duck.

From there I drove straight over to an RV dealership on the other side of the highway. An hour later, the guy’s hooking a brand-new 2022 teardrop camper onto my car.

The teardrop set me back $23,000, but what am I saving it for, a Brazilian butt lift?

I’m not some psycho stalker. I wasn’t going to bother the two of them. They wouldn’t even know I was there.

So there we were, me and Valerie, following in Kevin and Tammy’s footsteps—Valerie with her nose sticking out the window like she loves to do, picking up all the interesting smells along the way. I didn’t have much interest in posting on Instagram myself, but I created a new account just for the trip: @valeriediscoversamerica. Most people don’t give enough thought to a dog’s perspective on life.

Two days later we were out on the road. I wanted to send @kevinandtammylove a message, something along the lines of, “Hey you crazy kids! You influenced me more than you might expect!”

I still remember what I said to Valerie as we pulled out onto the highway that first day. “I can’t explain it,” I told her. “But I get the feeling this girl, Tammy, is going to need us at some point. When she does, we’ll be there.”

Valerie just stuck her head out the window and wagged like always. But she understood.

See how she looked up just now? She knows I’m talking about her. She knows I’m talking about him too. Did you catch that look in her eyes?

KEVIN

When you think about a road trip, the pictures that come to you are of all these great vistas along the way—mountains or beaches or waterfalls, funky little diners that turn out to have the best BLT ever, some old grandpa sitting by the side of the road whittling, and he invites you over to his house, where his wife is just taking a pie out of the oven, and it’s apple. The truth is, most of the time when you’re out on the road the way we were, what you see are highways, with the occasional rest stop and a McDonald’s. That first day, I pulled up to the golden arches, but Tammy had other ideas.

“We’re going to eat healthy, remember, babe?” she said. She had this powder that you mixed with water that had every nutrient a person’s body needed, supposedly. I poured mine out when she wasn’t looking. Who did she think she was, my mom?

ROXANNE

Being a dog, Valerie is highly attuned to her sense of smell. In Pennsylvania, for instance, @valeriediscoversamerica posted about how great the aromas were in the town of Hershey, on account of the chocolate factory. In North Carolina, she mentioned chasing squirrels at a rest stop. We didn’t have any followers, but that didn’t matter to me. Basically, all I cared about was following Kevin and Tammy. Correction. All I cared about was following Tammy, and looking out for her.

This will probably sound ridiculous, considering I couldn’t do a cartwheel to save my life and you definitely don’t want to see what I’d look like in a midriff top, but in an odd way, Tammy reminded me of myself. How I used to be a long time ago. Trusting, you know? Hopeful. With big plans.

We caught up with Tammy and Kevin—not that we got closer than a few miles away—around Cape Canaveral. Kevin had posted a picture of Tammy next to a rocket display. You could tell, from how he’d set up the picture, that he was making a joke. He positioned it so the rocket looked like it was pointed right at her private parts, if you follow me—but she didn’t have a clue. That’s what I mean about her being innocent, and how easy it was for a person like Kevin to take advantage of her.

Twenty-four hours later the two of them were posting from St. Simons Island, Georgia. Tammy had taken all this Spanish moss that hangs down from the trees there and put some on his head to make it look like he had hair. She was giving him a big selfie kiss and he had this expression on his face like “This isn’t funny.”

They were getting around! This meant that Valerie and I were doing the same. The next day Tammy mentioned that the two of them were heading to this place in Virginia, Chincoteague Island. She’d read a book when she was a kid about the wild ponies that lived there and she had her heart set on seeing them.

You had to love a girl who’d travel a few hundred miles in hope of catching sight of a pony.

KEVIN

By my calculations, the horse expedition was going to add a couple hundred dollars to our gas budget, not to mention the additional time it would take, driving a day and a half off course with a stop in Georgia along the way.

Tammy had different ideas. If we could get a picture of her with one of those wild ponies, it would attract all these followers. She said I had no idea how many horse-crazy people were out there. All we needed was #tammyatchincoteague.

Once we got there, we drove around a whole lot looking for those horses, but we never saw any, though there was a place alongside the road where they offered pony rides. That night, at our campground in Virginia, @kevinandtammylove was up to sixteen followers.

“How are people supposed to know we’re out here?” I asked Tammy from my bottom bunk.

She wasn’t all that sure. I could see Tammy’s anxieties setting in. But there was this one nutcase who sent Tammy a DM—some follower named @valeriediscoversamerica—that also loved the book about the wild ponies and always wanted to go there. Other than this one person that never posted anything and didn’t have any followers you could say the detour was pretty much a washout.

ROXANNE

There was this one post where Tammy was holding up her phone in selfie mode, talking about how she used to be chubby when she was younger and how she’d gone on a diet in her sophomore year of high school when all she ate was raw carrots for an entire month and her skin turned orange. This made me feel even closer to her—not the part about losing the weight, but the part about people making fun of you about your body. “All that really matters is what a person’s like on the inside,” she said.

Just at that point, he came up behind her—I’m talking about Kevin, naturally—and put his hand on her rear end with this stupid grin on his face.

She laughed but you could tell she didn’t like him doing that. She’d already explained to us all—their followers—that she wanted to be a virgin on her wedding night. She wanted to focus on the spiritual side of their relationship, but he didn’t look like the spiritual type.

KEVIN

I’m not going to lie to you. The sex part was frustrating. Tammy had this idea that there was something beautiful about focusing on what she called our inner lives. But you tell me, what guy wants to sleep on a single bed mattress with his girlfriend on the bunk above him, all across America?

LORRAINE

Not that it was my business, but I could tell Kevin was having a hard time with her. Nights he’d call home from whatever godforsaken place they were camping, he’d walk far enough away that she couldn’t hear him. “Sometimes I get the feeling she brought me along for the ride to play the role of the boyfriend,” he told me. “To get followers.”

ROGER

Tammy called us in the mornings, generally. She got up earlier than he did. She never said this, but Deb and I started getting the impression the guy wasn’t pulling his weight the way she’d hoped. One thing about Tammy: she always worked hard. Him? He always seemed to be taking a nap.

KEVIN

We were having a hard time coming up with things to talk about. We made a post of the two of us eating cotton candy on a Ferris wheel, but it didn’t exactly go viral. We were up to thirty followers maybe, on a good day.

Tammy had already shared her recipe for yogurt parfaits two different times—once, with blueberries and granola, the other time just the granola. I demonstrated a yoga headstand. We gave each other mud facials, but Tammy was worried people might think it was racist so we took that one down. She read a poem she found on the internet by Kahlil Gibran. We put out a call for our followers to ask us questions about our adventures, but we only got two responses. One was from that one crazy fan, @valeriediscoversamerica, to Tammy that just said, “You go, girl.” My mom called to say I looked like I was losing weight, was I getting enough to eat? What she actually said was, “Is Tammy feeding you enough?”

LORRAINE

You know how it is with mothers. We can always pick up what’s going on with our child. Even when they pretend everything’s fine.

They’d only been on the road a couple of weeks by this point—I think they were someplace like West Virginia—but I could hear it in my son’s voice. Something was wrong. As soon as I hung up, I told Fred, “I knew it. That girl’s no good for him.”

KEVIN

I’ll tell you when the first time was Tammy really got on my nerves. We had pulled into a rest stop in Ohio and there was this dog hanging out alongside the convenience store. He was really skinny, with patches on his skin where the fur was gone, and some kind of bug bites. I’m talking about a really ugly-looking dog.

Tammy got down on the ground and put her face up against his face, so he started slobbering all over her.

“Somebody just abandoned him,” she said. “We need to take him with us.”

At first I thought she was kidding but she wasn’t.

“Where’s this mutt supposed to sleep?” I said. Never mind all the other problems.

“With me,” she said.

All I could think was, “Give me a break. I don’t get to sleep with Tammy, but she’ll cozy up with this mutt with drool all over his face.”

In the end, I convinced her we couldn’t take him. She cried all the way to Kentucky. That night at our campsite, when we checked our Instagram, we were only up to thirty-six followers.

“We’d be doing better if you’d let me keep the dog,” Tammy said.

LORRAINE

Of course, now everyone’s saying all these great things about what a wonderful person Tammy was. And naturally, Fred and I feel terrible about her passing on. But just for the record, someone needs to say this: Tammy Partridge was no angel. She wanted to be this person who was all over the internet, like one of those Kardashians. From the moment she got her hooks into my son, she was working on her plan. Do you think the Partridges had the resources to buy that Sprinter van? Without the cash from my husband and me, that girl would still be cleaning out animal cages at minimum wage and driving a Hyundai.

DEB

The damn Sprinter van. Every time I see one, all I can think is, if his parents never got it for their son, our girl would still be home with us, working for the vet.

ROXANNE

The two of them weren’t exactly traveling as the crow flies, but from what they posted, it seemed like their general destination was the Northwest, then California. Every day they’d mention where they were headed next. When they posted about heading to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, Tammy mentioned how “Coat of Many Colors” was her all-time favorite song. She was trying to convince Kevin to take her to Dollywood, but he said it wasn’t in their budget. So I couldn’t tell whether they were going there or not. Other times all they’d say was, “Next stop, Arkansas.”

In other words, a lot of the time the information Tammy and Kevin offered about their itinerary didn’t pinpoint some particular spot you could count on seeing them at. I knew I probably wasn’t going to be exactly in the same place as they were but that was okay. I liked knowing they’d be close by, and that Valerie and I would be having the same adventures as them, more or less. Minus the romance part.

By this point, Tammy and Kevin were up to a little over a hundred followers. Not exactly setting the world on fire. Now and then Tammy would mention the exact place they were visiting or where she and Kevin were staying. She might give the name of some restaurant they stopped at where they had this great po’ boy sandwich. Or they’d post a picture of a mini–golf course with a giant pink brontosaurus, or a statue of Paul Bunyan. I missed out on those, but I had this dream that at some point Valerie and I might actually meet up with Tammy and Kevin at one of these destinations of theirs. I’d be like this big sister Tammy never knew she had, watching over her. Sharing our lives, in a manner of speaking.

Then this one event happened that made me know it was some kind of destiny that I was making this trip. In the women’s bathroom at a Quick Stop in Indiana, someone had left their cell phone on the back of the toilet.

I picked it up, naturally. And what do you know? There was one of those pictures people take in a photo booth, laminated onto the back of the phone. Get this: the two people in the picture were Tammy and Kevin. If that isn’t destiny, tell me what is.

I could have made something out of this, but I was keeping a low profile. So I just turned the phone in to the man at the cash register. I knew Tammy and Kevin would be back to get it, so I waited in the parking lot for their van to show up. An hour later, Kevin pops out of the van.

He looked skinnier than I’d pictured from their videos and mad. I could just barely see Tammy through the windows.

“She’s not happy,” I told Valerie. She seemed to agree.

KEVIN

We were headed to the Hoosier National Forest. I have to admit, I wasn’t in the best mood to begin with. Seventeen days on the road, over a hundred posts, and all we had to show for our efforts were 108 followers.

Then, fifty miles from the last place we’d gassed up, Tammy realized she’d left her cell phone in the bathroom back at the Quick Stop and we had to go back for it. Can you blame a guy for being pissed off?

When we got to the place Tammy left her phone, it turned out some woman had actually turned it in to the guy at the counter. She decided to make a video about how many good people there were out in the world, if you thought about it.

“There’s so much focus on the negative all the time,” she said, looking into the phone that had just been returned to her. “But goodness and love are everywhere, if you just look.” The woman who turned in her phone, prime example. “I wish I could have thanked her,” she said. “Who knows, maybe she’s reading this right now.”

ROXANNE

Tammy mentioned me in her post, not by name of course. But I knew it was me she was talking about. She knew I cared, and she cared back. That’s all it took. After that, I was in—a thousand percent in. I told Valerie I wasn’t going to let anything happen to that girl. Valerie wagged.

Once we’d crossed paths at the Quick Stop, it was easy to stay in range of those two, but I gave them their space. Given how noticeable I’d be, hauling my teardrop camper, I never followed directly behind their vehicle. I never took a campsite right next to them.

How can I describe the way it felt, being that close to her? It was almost like getting to be a character in your favorite TV show. Not one of the stars of course. Just an extra. That was enough. Before, when I was just out on the road, not knowing their location, I’d look up at the moon sometimes, or the stars, and know Tammy was seeing the same sky, and the next morning she’d be seeing the same sunrise. But when I found her phone, I was touching the same keys she’d been typing on, looking at the same screen. Nights at whatever campground we were staying at, I could smell the same meat cooking on the same campfire. I could imagine how it might be, at one of the campgrounds where the women’s showers were lined up next to each other, if Tammy was there the same time as me, in the stall next to mine. I could call out, through the wall, “Can I share your soap?”

When they stopped at a diner, I mostly stayed outside in the parking lot, though one time, when Tammy posted about this really great apple pie they were eating at this one spot, somewhere in Indiana, I left Valerie in the car and ran inside to get myself a slice. The waitress wanted to heat it up for me and put a dollop of ice cream on, but I couldn’t risk them leaving before me and us getting separated.

I took the pie to go. I gave some of the pie to Valerie and tossed the rest. She watches her weight.

KEVIN

Somewhere in Kansas, Tammy pointed out this camper. Teardrop-style, New Jersey plates. We kept seeing it on the highway.

She thought the camper was cute. “Maybe it’s one of our fans,” she said.

Given that we were only up to 127 followers, this didn’t seem that likely.

ROXANNE

I was following right alongside them now, but keeping out of sight. At a diner outside Lincoln, Nebraska—the two of them at a booth, me at the counter, Valerie in my bag—I saw Kevin slam a bill on the table and walk out on his own. He left Tammy just sitting there.

The Instagram post she put up half an hour later showed a slice of lemon meringue pie. Somewhere around Tennessee, Tammy seemed to have loosened up considerably on her no-sugar policy. Pie’s a big favorite on social media, of course. You can’t blame a girl for wanting to keep her fans happy. Though just because a girl posts a picture of herself digging into a slice of pie doesn’t mean she actually ate it.

So I ordered the lemon meringue too. (A little on the sweet side, if you ask me.) But that night, at the campground I’d followed them to, I could hear Kevin’s voice, a couple of campers over. He was going on about how she’d embarrassed him with some comment she’d made to a guy they’d met there about how Kevin looked when he did sun salutations.

After that all I could make out was her crying, him slamming the van door. Valerie started barking. She has this thing she does sometimes, where she shows her teeth. Not in a happy or friendly way. She was doing it.

KEVIN

I’d never spent so much time with one person before. My parents of course, on trips to visit my grandparents—and to Washington, DC, when I was in junior high, and to Luray Caverns the summer I was fifteen, when I didn’t get picked for the all-star team in softball and my mom wanted to cheer me up. Like looking at a bunch of stalactites and stalagmites was going to do that.

But those trips with my family were different. I could just space out in the back playing on my Nintendo DS. This time around, Tammy was always wanting to talk, and not just about things like when we should stop for lunch and which Sirius station we’d listen to.

Tammy wanted to have these big discussions about our lives and our future, about wanting to be this famous influencer that girls came up to for selfies. How she might have a YouTube channel for yoga and nutrition, or maybe a brand of natural cosmetics. She pictured the two of us being like that couple on HGTV that renovates houses for people, only instead of renovating houses, we’d work on relationships. Just one relationship, actually. Ours.

Tammy had bought a book before the trip, of questions to ask your partner to get to this more intense place. Out of the blue, she’d ask something like what was my spirit animal or if somebody told me I had a terminal illness, how would I want to spend my last day of life? Would I rather be the person that loved somebody more than she loved me, or would I rather be the person who got more love from my partner than I could give back? Which did I think was better?

“Are those my only two choices?” I said. How about we’re both into each other exactly the same amount? How about nobody loves each other all that much, so whatever happens, it’s not going to be that serious?

“You’re not answering the question,” Tammy said. “I want to go into the deep end with you.”

“Can’t we just hang out?” I asked her.

We had to think of our followers, she told me. We were up to 297.

LORRAINE

He called every night. One time when they were camping in the Badlands of South Dakota, where the cell service was bad, he drove twenty minutes to get into a better zone. That was my son for you.

You want to know a man’s true colors? Look at how he treats his mom.

KEVIN

It got to where I started putting in my earbuds a lot. Even when I wasn’t listening to a podcast or a game, just to have some peace and quiet. This was when Tammy started handing me notes. I’d be driving on some interstate trying to chill out and all of a sudden, she’d be holding up a page of notebook paper in front of my face with a picture of a kitten on it, looking sad. The note might say “Do you still love me?” or maybe just “Love.” If this was just one time, I could have said something nice back, but she wouldn’t let up. The minute I answered one of Tammy’s notes, she’d be busy holding up a new one.

It turned out you couldn’t just drive up to a national park and get a campsite. With a lot of them, we couldn’t even get in. Tammy kept ragging on me that we had to be at the gate by some ridiculous time like seven in the morning, but I’m sorry, I’m just not a morning person, and anyway, all these old people with senior citizen passes were probably going to get the spaces. They’d booked everything a year ahead.

So we started picking out state parks instead, or KOA campgrounds that had a swimming pool and a jacuzzi, or, when necessary, Walmart. For our nightly @kevinandtammylove Instagram story, Tammy would give some weight-loss tip like drinking apple cider vinegar before meals, only you had to be careful to brush your teeth after or the vinegar would eat away the enamel. Sometimes she’d find some quote on the internet about living your best life.

It’s a lot of pressure, living your best life every single day. Sometimes a person just wants to veg out a little, watch dumb videos, and eat Cheetos. Not with Tammy around. Everybody thinks she was so sweet all the time—and she was amazing, naturally, may she rest in peace—but that girl could be a ballbuster.

All the way back in Illinois, I thought I’d start growing a beard. Tammy announced this to our followers, making it some kind of contest where everyone was supposed to stop shaving along with me and send in their pictures to see who had the fullest beard. Two people sent pictures in. One was my dad.

I wished we’d never started this beard deal. It turned out that my beard came in patchy. There was a little hair on my lip and a few places on my chin, but mostly it looked like I just had dirt on my face. Tammy said something on our Instagram about this.

Somewhere in South Dakota, she made a joke. Something like how maybe I was still going through puberty.

I guess this was supposed to be funny. “See how you’d feel if I started making jokes about cellulite on your butt,” I said.

“I don’t have cellulite on my butt,” she told me.

“How do you know?” I said. “You never saw yourself from behind.”

It wasn’t actually true, but she started doing all these exercises after that.

ROXANNE

I followed the Sprinter to a campground in South Dakota. I made sure to park the teardrop out of their sight line.

When I saw Tammy heading to the women’s showers, I followed, but far enough behind that she’d never notice. I took the stall next to hers.

I didn’t expect what happened next, after she turned on the water. I could make out the sound of crying. The big ugly kind, where the person’s gasping for breath.

KEVIN

By the time we reached North Dakota, we had only gained four more followers. I was feeling discouraged but Tammy said that’s how things went in the influencer world. You might plateau for a while. Then just when you least expected it, some post you put up went viral, and the next thing you knew you’d hit the big time.

We had a fight on a long stretch of highway. This wasn’t even close to the first one, but it was the first time things got what you might call out of hand. We had a flat tire, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the iron around the bolts, so in the end we had to call roadside assistance. Tammy was in one of her moods.

After the mechanic left, Tammy started talking about her dad, and how he worked on their car himself, how he built the deck on their house, not to mention how he rebuilt this old Mustang from his college days. The upholstery and everything. And when he was done with that project, he installed black-and-white tile on the floor of their garage to make it look like a garage at the Indy 500.

The way she talked, it made me feel two feet tall. I didn’t want to say a bunch of nasty stuff back, so I just put in my earbuds as per usual. Tammy held up one of those notes she was always making with a sad face on it that said, “I’m sorry,” but I was still mad, so I figured the best thing was to ignore her.

Then she yanked one of my earbuds out and threw it out the car window. I slammed on the brakes so I could pull over and find it. The car behind almost rear-ended us. Next thing you know, Tammy was crying.

This was when she picked up her phone and pointed it at her face and started talking. Basically, she was saying what a shitty time we were having and how maybe our relationship was hopeless.

Like always, I tried to defuse the situation. “This isn’t the kind of thing we put in our videos,” I told her. “What kind of an impression do you think you’re going to make to our followers if they see you blubbering all over the place?”

Not to mention what our parents would think. My mom for one.

“I want to be real,” Tammy said. “I don’t just want to show everyone all these cute pictures of us having fun. I want to give the whole story of what it takes to build a relationship. The dark side too.”

“If you could see yourself,” I told her. Her eyes were all red and puffy, and she hadn’t even put any makeup on. She had the beginnings of a zit on her nose. I started thinking, Let me out of here. But what are you going to do when this thought comes to you in the middle of some place like North Dakota?

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m human. So are the people watching us right now. They’ve got their own problems. They can relate.” She was gasping for breath while she talked, and there was snot coming out of her nose.

“You’re hysterical,” I said.

“You talk to me like you’re the guy at the DMV,” she told me.

The camera was on the whole time she was saying these things, evidently. She was livestreaming. I didn’t understand that before, but at this point Tammy put the phone very close to her face, so close a person could probably see up her nostrils. She was saying how it’s natural for couples to have disagreements sometimes. The important thing is talking them through.

“Just because you love somebody doesn’t mean they don’t drive you crazy sometimes, right?” she said. “I’m not the first person that ever sat in the passenger seat of some car next to her boyfriend, and all she wants to do is jump out of the car.”

After that we didn’t talk to each other all the way to the Montana border. But that night, in our bunks in the Sprinter—her top, me bottom—I took out my phone to check our Instagram likes, same as I always did: 857, with 410 shares, plus a DM from @valeriediscoversamerica that said, “Chin up. I’m always there for you, girlfriend.” We weren’t exactly going viral, but of all our posts on @kevinandtammylove, that was the top rated by far.

“Reality isn’t always pretty,” Tammy said. “But that’s what people respond to.”

“Who’s to say what’s real?” I told her.

Maybe nothing was.

By the start of our fourth week on the road, we were fighting all the time. We made some beautiful posts of the two of us popping a bottle of champagne or standing next to each other doing tree pose, but when the camera was off, we got into these stupid arguments, like why did I finish off the last of the dry roasted almonds or did I have to leave my wet towel on the floor. Sometimes when we’d start in with one of our fights, Tammy would pick up her phone and begin shooting the two of us, though mostly she didn’t, knowing our parents back home were following us. After that one time when she posted the video of herself crying, her dad in particular got freaked out and my mom sent me a text asking if I was sure this was the girl for me. After that, we tried to keep a lid on it.

We were up to 937 followers, which was still nowhere near enough to attract sponsorships. There was a guy in Ohio who had found one of our posts by accident—one where Tammy was Hula-Hooping on a mesa. He started sending her all these messages about how beautiful she was. Tammy got a kick out of this, but in my opinion the guy was a creep. There was another guy who said he was on season five of The Bachelor, but when we looked him up, he wasn’t. As usual, @valeriediscoversamerica checked in: “You go, girl.”

Still, @kevinandtammylove hardly ever got past the five hundred mark for views when we livestreamed. Generally, it was way less. Tammy started to talk about how maybe we should get a ukulele or something, to add a new element to our posts. Not that either of us knew how to play, but that could be part of it. Tammy had read this article online called “Making Your First Million on Social Media” that said ukuleles were trending, along with hydroponic gardening, tattoos, eco-friendly period products, and Boston terriers.

LORRAINE

Our other son, Henry, never developed a relationship with Kevin. Let’s be honest: Henry never developed much of a relationship with anyone. No friends. No outside interests besides the computer, where he basically spent every waking hour. Walking past his room, I could sometimes hear the sound of some game or video. Late at night, a blue glow showed in the space between his door and the floor. Other than that, you’d hardly know Henry lived at our house.

Given how little interest he paid to anyone in our family, I was kind of surprised to learn—one morning while I was making coffee, and my younger son passed through the kitchen for a can of Diet Coke—that Henry was tracking Kevin and Tammy’s travels and their number of likes, also their number of new followers. He’d created some kind of algorithm about their progress. According to Henry, Kevin and Tammy were due to reach a million followers somewhere around 2093. This wasn’t good news, but it was probably the only indication we’d received, in the last fifteen years, that he took any interest in his older brother.

Thank god we had Kevin. If all I had for a son was Henry, I might have jumped off a bridge years ago. Kevin was the one—the only one—who made me proud. Seeing him having a hard time, racking up followers on this new project of his, of becoming an influencer, was hard for me, but I kept trying to encourage him, naturally.

“Look on the bright side,” I told him. “There’s this person named @valeriediscoversamerica who seems to really love you guys.” This was the good news. If Kevin wanted to become a famous influencer, he’d have to do better than that, obviously.

ROXANNE

One thing I could tell about Kevin: he was not a dog person. Not that he ever said a word on this topic. You know how I could tell? Valerie. Every time she heard his voice coming out of my phone when I was playing one of their videos, she’d bare those little teeth of hers. Which are plenty sharp, by the way. I should know. I brush them every night.

KEVIN

Don’t get me wrong. Tammy and I had some great times. We saw some great places. There was this one night somewhere in the Rocky Mountains where we hadn’t been able to find a campground so we just pulled over by the side of the highway and there was no moon, and no lights anywhere. It was like we were in a planetarium, the stars were so bright, only this wasn’t a class trip where we were sitting in theater seats looking up at the ceiling, with some guy off in a room in the back working a control panel. The stars in the planetarium were just light bulbs. This was real life.

All of a sudden, I felt very small, but instead of being a big downer, feeling this way, it was actually kind of nice. All these problems that had seemed so important, like whether Tammy remembered to put our dishes in the dish drainer or if we got to twenty thousand followers and some company offered us an endorsement deal for their skateboards or their whitening toothpaste or their leggings—all those things didn’t matter anymore. We were just specks in the universe.

I reached over to Tammy, looking up at the sky. I reached for her hand.

She picked up her phone to take a picture.

I told her, “Could we just experience real life for once, without the phone?”

“I didn’t know this was real life,” she said. “I thought you were just doing that for our followers.”

ROXANNE

After they started getting more popular, I noticed Tammy was changing. She didn’t seem like the person she used to be, when the two of them started out on the road. Not that I didn’t still want to look out for her. I still knew she needed Valerie and me. But she started sounding like this person on some commercial. Sometimes, after reading one of her posts or listening to some video she made about yoga or nutrition or the meaning of life, I’d turn to Valerie and say, “I miss our girl.” Moments like this, Valerie would lean her head on my hand—the one holding on to the steering wheel—and lick it. She understood.

KEVIN

One of the things that happens when you’re traveling the way Tammy and I did is you meet a lot of different types of people. Mostly at campsites or out on the trail, times we went on hikes, but also at diners, though we didn’t stop at those places much, partly to economize and also because Tammy kept trying to keep on her vegetarian diet. I still liked a burger now and then. Steak if possible.

One type of traveler you’d meet, camping out, were people who had been on the road for years. Solo van dwellers, they called themselves. A lot of them were women and they usually had dogs, though sometimes it was a cat. One woman we met had a pet ferret. Many of these women kept to themselves, and I got the feeling in a lot of cases that they weren’t wild about men, but they could tell you where all the best Walmart parking lots were and where to get a hot shower.

With a lot of the women we met, I got the feeling that they didn’t trust me. They always wanted to get Tammy off alone, like they thought maybe she needed to confide in them about me—along with the entire male race, most likely. Tammy also got weird around the women van dwellers. I’d get the feeling she was embarrassed to be with me in the first place instead of off by herself like the rest of them, like it was a sign of weakness that she was out there with a guy at all, instead of on her own like these other women. She’d start talking in this different voice—loud, and aggressive, and she made jokes about me that weren’t funny, like telling these women about the time I tried to change the tire and couldn’t figure out how, or the time I thought a bear came over to our camper and I reached for my baseball bat only it turned out to be someone’s poodle from the next campsite.

“This is Kevin,” she’d say, introducing me to some solo van dweller type who probably built her own solar panels and did her own brake jobs. “He’s scared of bears, but I protect him.” Then she’d let out this weird laugh—the kind of laugh a person makes when they pretend something’s funny, only really they don’t think it’s funny at all. Like saying LOL to cover up that really you’re not amused at all. You’re pissed.

I didn’t say anything at the time, but after, alone in the dark in our separate bunks as usual, I told Tammy she made me look like an idiot to those solo van dwellers. They were probably all lesbians who just wanted to get in her pants.

“I thought it was cute,” she said. “You running away from that dog with your hands in the air. And the whole time you were screaming, the poodle’s pom-pom tail kept wagging.”

“I wasn’t screaming,” I said. “I just got taken by surprise. If it had been a bear, we could have been in trouble.”

ROXANNE

At a campground in Montana, I parked the teardrop just far enough from their van that Kevin and Tammy couldn’t see me, but close enough to keep an eye out. These two women in a VW Vanagon started chatting Tammy up. I couldn’t hear what it was about, but they were all laughing.

“They don’t understand her like we do,” I told Valerie.

Off to the side, I could see Kevin doing something on his phone.

KEVIN

Tammy showed me an ad she’d seen on the internet for a product that made you grow new hair follicles. She said maybe I should give this product a try.

Or maybe I should just say some things in one of our videos about how I was losing my hair this young. Exposing my vulnerabilities, is how she put it. According to Tammy, people loved it when you did stuff like that.

I started to feel like I was her project. She was going to turn me into the person who deserved to be her partner if it killed her. If I wasn’t always the person she wanted me to be, she’d turn me into him.

One of the big things between us was the sex issue. I’ll say it more plainly: the fact that I wasn’t getting laid. Not only was Tammy holding on to her idea about saving herself for her wedding night, but for some strange reason, even the making out we used to do had basically stopped. She’d barely let me lay a hand on her since West Virginia.

“I think I’m in a phase where I’m trying to tune in more to my spiritual side,” she told me. Just my luck.

To our 943 followers on @kevinandtammylove, we came across as this super-cute, super-romantic couple, holding hands on the beach and looking into each other’s eyes around the campfire. The truth is, it’s not necessarily the most romantic thing, sharing a latrine with somebody. Also, I started seeing this side of Tammy I hadn’t known about before. The critical part. She thought I was eating too many McDonald’s fries. She wanted me to be more mindful. She wouldn’t let up with the jokes about my hair.

She said my comments on our IG posts weren’t all that interesting, and that all I talked much about was the weather.

“I can’t always come up with something amazing to say,” I told her. “I run out of ideas.”

Not Tammy. She had a million of them.

“Maybe if we had sex, things would get a little more interesting,” I said.

“I already told our followers about my commitment to stay a virgin all across America,” she said. “I can’t change now.”

Like everything we put out on social media had to be the truth. Like we’d be the first people to post something on Instagram that wasn’t exactly the same as our actual life.

The thing about being an influencer, she said, is not just how you go out and influence your followers to do better. You influence yourself to do better too. When there’s all these people following what you do—okay, not that many—you can’t let them down.

Take @valeriediscoversamerica, she said, meaning the nutcase who liked every post two minutes after it went up. Here was a person we’d never even met, and from what she wrote in her messages—to Tammy, never to me—following this trip of ours was the big event of her life.

ROXANNE

You probably want to know why I’m single. So here’s the truth. I only fell in love one time.

I met Ernie online. I was thirty-six years old. I’d never had a boyfriend.

Given that Ernie lived in California and I was in New Jersey, we wrote back and forth for a year. He wasn’t big on talking on the phone but we texted every day. The rest would come later, he told me.

I didn’t mind taking things slow. Just knowing someone was out there, wanting to read my texts, was enough.

I could tell right away we were soul mates. I could give you plenty of examples but, for instance, he had a midnight-blue Toyota Camry. So did I. We both hated ketchup on our hot dogs but loved mustard. We both collected rocks when we were kids. We both loved to bowl.

He was writing a screenplay about the life of Ray Williams Jr., the most famous bowler in history. Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to star in it. The only problem was, he needed $10,000 to hire this agent who was going to arrange the deal for him.

Of course I wired him the money. I believed in Ernie. As soon as he sold his screenplay, he was going to send me a ticket to meet him in Hollywood.

Somewhere around the two-year mark, seeing things were taking a little longer than we thought, I told him no problem. I’d buy my own ticket. “I’ll help you while you finish your screenplay,” I said. “Cook your meals. Give you creative inspiration.”

He said he’d be waiting for me at baggage claim when I got off the plane. I only brought one suitcase, but I had invested in some Victoria’s Secret. Look for the guy with a dozen long-stemmed roses and a giant smile on his face, he texted me.

When I couldn’t find him at the carousel, I figured he got stuck in traffic. I waited through three different sets of baggage from different flights after mine. When I texted Ernie, I got no response. Called his number. Nobody picked up.

You might have thought I’d stay out in LA a few days anyway, to take in the sights. The Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Chinese Theater, Universal Studios. I didn’t have the heart for any of it. I flew back home that night.

The next day I went to the pet store. I came home with Valerie.

I was done with love after that. For myself anyway. My mission—mine and Valerie’s—was to protect other vulnerable young women from the kind of heartbreak I’d been through, over some man that never deserved them in the first place.

KEVIN

I was going over the spreadsheet of our finances, which indicated that we were almost 40 percent above where we should have been in spending on meals and gas. Tammy had just finished making a post about how to massage kale. Or maybe the kale massage post was the night before. She might have been talking about the healing powers of crystals. Her amethyst heart necklace that I gave her, for example. According to Tammy, amethyst was good for digestive health and regulating hormones.

All of a sudden, I heard her let out this scream. I was thinking maybe she got bit by a snake but it turned out to be good news. Checking our Instagram account, she’d just learned we finally reached a thousand followers. We had a long way to go, but at least we were moving in the right direction. I was feeling hopeful.

The next night we camped in the Sawtooth Wilderness. I was building a fire and, as usual, not living up to Tammy’s standards because I needed to use fire-starters from Home Depot. A guy whose truck was parked in the campsite a little ways from ours came over to where we’d set up. He was carrying some kindling. He asked if we could use some help.

His name was Chad, and he looked like a personal trainer (which it turned out he was). Also a life coach. He was driving cross country having this experience he called a vision quest.

It turned out Chad was also an Eagle Scout, which is how he’d learned to start a fire without using any of the special pellets I threw in to get things going. Just a couple of sticks he rubbed together. “I saw you were having trouble getting your campfire started, so I thought I’d lend a hand,” he said.

If you asked me, what he saw was Tammy’s butt, bending over the cooler, but I offered him a beer. He said he only drank purified water and kombucha that he made himself.

Kombucha. Music to Tammy’s ears. For the next half hour, the two of them talked about fermenting foods and the importance of cultivating the right kind of bacteria in your gut. I checked the score for the Marlins game. They were losing, as usual.

When I got back to the campfire—which was blazing, naturally—the conversation had moved on. Evidently Chad had recently broken up with his girlfriend, and even though it was his idea—something about the two of them not being on the same spiritual path—he was having a hard time processing it. Tammy was super sympathetic, naturally.

“It’s so important that two people in a relationship share the same values,” he said. “Olivia used to say she was down for the simple things in life, but then I’d see her checking her phone, checking out some stupid makeup tutorial.” Chad was more into the natural look.

“I have to admit, I wear makeup sometimes,” Tammy told him. “Being an influencer, on camera all the time, sometimes my skin just needs a little extra boost.”

“You don’t need anything on your face,” he told her. “You’ve got this natural glow from within.”

Finally, Chad went back to his tent and we climbed into our bunks. I told Tammy it looked to me like she had the hots for this Chad guy.

“I just like him,” she said. “Why does everything always have to be about sex? You’re the one who’s got sex on his mind the whole time.”

I could have given a lot of answers to that one. Like, “What’s wrong with that?” And, “Maybe I wouldn’t think about sex so much if I was getting some.” But I let it go. That was me, always trying to keep the peace.

But after, when the lights were out, I kept replaying our conversation. In the bunk above me, I could hear Tammy’s breathing slowed down in the way that meant she was asleep. I started thinking about her policy of not having sex until we got married and wondering what kind of a dope I was to go along with that. I’d actually been enough of an idiot to respect her for being so pure. Maybe some part of me felt like as long as we didn’t do the deed, I didn’t have to worry that I wouldn’t do it well enough and that could be one more thing about me that disappointed her. On the other hand, whose family had paid for the Sprinter van? Who did most of the driving? Who paid for the gas?

The next morning, before the sun got up even, I climbed the ladder to her bunk and put my hand inside her pajama top.

“You never asked me how I thought about this ‘no sex’ business,” I told her. “Then you expect me to climb onto a single bed bunk bed mattress every night and close my eyes while you put on your pj’s like we’re a couple of little kids. Do you even want a man? Or do you just want someone to change the propane tank?”

Which, truthfully, I had trouble with. One of the solo van dweller women had helped me out.

Tammy just sat there holding her stuffed rabbit and her cell phone. She had been making a recording about her obsession with coconut granola. @kevinandtammylove had been holding steady at 1,006 followers for three days straight, and other than @valeriediscoversamerica and the creepy guy who wrote to ask if Tammy would send him a pair of her panties after she’d worn them, it was starting to look like we’d hit a plateau.

“You want people to think we’re this perfect couple,” I told her. “How about this for a news flash? Couples fuck.”

“Do you have to use that word?” she said. “It sounds dirty.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Sometimes life gets that way. Just not on Instagram, huh?”

Okay. Sue me. I let my emotions get the better of me for a while. For my last words on earth, I don’t want to give the impression I was some kind of horndog.

I was just trying to express my love. Is there anything so terrible about that?

ROXANNE

Up until then, my sightings of Tammy and Kevin had been brief and covert. They’d never laid eyes on me, or Valerie, though on the few occasions we’d been in the same physical space, or close, Valerie had started barking so hard I had to put her in the car. Then, this one day, Tammy mentions they’re heading to a campsite in the Sawtooth National Forest. From the map, I could tell exactly where this place was that she was talking about. I made a beeline to get there before dark.

KEVIN

On our first night in Idaho, we run into a woman traveling solo with her dog. If I had to guess, I’d say she was around the age of our moms, give or take a few years. Not exactly fat, but definitely not somebody you’d expect to see out on some hiking trail. She told us she had a camper a few campsites over from ours. She had a little dog that never stopped barking.

It was her dog that brought us together, if you want to put it that way. I was grilling a steak—the kind of food Tammy didn’t think we should be eating, the kind of meal a guy like her new pal Chad wouldn’t touch. In my opinion, every now and then a red-blooded guy needs red meat—which could have been Chad’s problem, come to think of it.

So there I am at the grill, just about to flip my steak while Tammy meditates. I guess the dog must have smelled the meat because all of a sudden there was this little mop-haired yapper, squatting next to the campfire, eyeing my dinner.

Next thing you know, the dog jumped up and took my strip steak right off the grill with her sharp little teeth. She tore into that meat so fast there was no way I could stop her, and when I tried, she sank those little teeth in my hand. I’ve still got the bite marks. I reached for my spatula and gave her a tap on the snout, just to keep her from attacking again. Strictly self-defense.

This was when her owner came over. “I need to apologize for my little friend here,” she said. Meaning the dog, evidently. The woman’s name was Roxanne.

“You know we’ve discussed this before,” she said, and at first I didn’t know what she meant, but then I got it. She was talking to the dog. Come to think of it, the way she talked to this little dog of hers was a little like the way Tammy had been talking to me, lately. You could say Roxanne treated that little dog like a person. But you could also say Tammy treated me like a little dog.

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt the nice man,” Roxanne said, still talking to her dog, which was curled up next to Roxanne, chewing on the last of my steak dinner.

Roxanne explained to Tammy how she was a vegetarian, which meant that the dog hardly ever got to be around meat, which is why she got super worked up when she had the chance.

“I’m a vegetarian too,” Tammy told Roxanne. Next thing you know, the two of them were sitting on the yoga mat side by side, talking about quinoa recipes and which was better, firm tofu or the silky kind, and Roxanne went back to her camper. She came back with a bottle of red wine. I stuck to beer, but she poured a glass for Tammy and her.

Before you knew it, Roxanne was admiring Tammy’s necklace that I gave her, with the heart, and Tammy was telling Roxanne what a great breed Havanese was. Tammy was telling Roxanne our life story, all about how we were influencers, growing our brand, and how we were just over a thousand followers. To see her reaction, you would have thought Roxanne was meeting Oprah or somebody, she was that excited.

It turned out Roxanne used to work at an Amazon fulfillment center in New Jersey, which basically meant she spent forty hours a week—more, during the holidays—putting boxes onto carts and wheeling them out to a truck bay. She’d been doing this for eleven years.

“One day I woke up and it hit me, ‘This is my life,’” this Roxanne person told Tammy. “It was only a matter of time before they replaced me with a robot,” she said. “I didn’t want to sit around and wait for that to happen. I wanted the two of us to see the world.” She meant her and the dog.

“You only go around once, right?” she said.

“And now here we are, making friends with a couple of famous influencers,” she said, talking to the dog as per usual. “And having all these adventures.”

The dog just made a noise, this low growling sound.

The next morning, before we took off, Roxanne came by our campsite again, with that scrawny mutt of hers trotting alongside, naturally. Roxanne wanted to take a picture with us and exchange email addresses. Not with me, actually. Just Tammy. The way she cuddled up to Tammy, I got the feeling she was probably—here’s an expression of my dad’s—from the Isle of Lesbos. I explained this to Tammy after she left, knowing the thought would probably never have occurred to her.

“What’s wrong with a woman loving other women?” Tammy said.

It was time to put in my earbuds.

ROXANNE

After all that time following her, Valerie and I finally got to meet Tammy. Kevin too, naturally. It was Valerie who arranged our meeting, by taking Kevin’s steak. She can be a crafty one, that Valerie. Even though it was clear she disliked Kevin, you knew what she was thinking. “Maybe he’ll make steak again.”

As for Tammy, she was friendly and open, same as I knew she’d be. That persona I’d been worried about, the one creeping into her posts, was just something she’d adopted to pick up more followers probably. She was still the same sweet, innocent person I’d noticed, way back when the two of them were just starting out on their trip.

“So are you camping in a tent or do you have a van?” she asked me.

“Teardrop camper,” I said.

Tammy said, “Oh, I love those. Teardrop campers are the cutest.”

I looked at Kevin. He had this look on his face, like this really lame guy who used to work with me back at the fulfillment center, when someone gave him a list of fifteen orders to fill at once, and his brain could only handle three. He was trying to put it together.

KEVIN

Every night, except times when there was no cell service, we called our parents. Her dad just filled us in on his golf scores and what a bad season the Marlins were having. Her mom gave her updates on their dachshund. My mom had gotten into following all these other influencers, like some girl who demonstrated barbecue techniques and another girl who talked about playing poker, and a dumpster diver who posted a different picture every day of lamps and tables he’d made out of trash.

“I see you two have 1,033 followers now,” my dad said. “Is that supposed to be good?”

“I think you two just need more of a gimmick,” my mom said. “Like if one of you had a terminal disease.”

So long as the one with the terminal disease was Tammy. That would have suited my mom fine.

We hadn’t hit on our gimmick yet. After that one time when Tammy cried on our Instagram feed, and our numbers spiked, we’d gone back to posts about yoga postures and pointing out rainbows and new uses for cashew butter. When you got down to it, there wasn’t all that much new to say about some mountain range or cloud formation or one more slice of French toast at some diner where they served real maple syrup instead of the fake stuff. Not that I cared, but Tammy liked everything to be natural.

One person who always seemed enthusiastic about the stuff we posted was @valeriediscoversamerica. I don’t know when she ever got any driving done because from the looks of things, she was online all day. Every time Tammy posted a picture, there’d be a ping ten seconds later from you-know-who. The pictures she liked best, naturally, were the ones with Tammy in them. Those, and one Tammy posted one time with a Boston terrier we met at a campground.

“@valeriediscoversamerica has got a thing for you,” I told Tammy.

“There you go again, making everything about sex,” Tammy said. “Did it ever occur to you that @valeriediscoversamerica might just feel as passionate as I do about spirituality and eco-conscious living?”

This is when the thought hit me. Who this person was we met up with at our campsite in Idaho, with the dog that stole my dinner. This Roxanne person with the yappy dog had a teardrop camper.

“Why don’t you email your new best friend Roxanne?” I said to Tammy. “Ask her the name of her dog.”

A minute hadn’t even passed before she wrote back: Valerie.

So you’re @valeriediscoversamerica? Tammy wrote. That’s so cool.

Roxanne wrote back right away: LOL. Busted.

On top of everything else going on, this made me kind of depressed. Like all this time we thought we had this devoted follower out there someplace liking our posts, even when hardly anybody else seemed to notice them. Now it turned out she was just some old loser driving around with her dog.

When I told Tammy, I thought she’d be weirded out, but she wasn’t. Tammy sent a message to Roxanne to say we could meet up again.

Thirty seconds later, Roxanne answered back. She and Valerie were a mile down the highway. Tammy texted her to join us for tempeh burgers.

“Are you nuts?” I said. “Why would we hang out with some loser that does jigsaw puzzles and talks to her dog?” I had to remind Tammy that Roxanne didn’t come close to the kind of demographic we needed to attract in our career as influencers. We wanted the cool people.

“She’s just lonely,” Tammy said. “I get the feeling Valerie’s all she has in life.”

“There’s plenty of lonely people in the world,” I told her. “They don’t have to be our best friend.” I was looking at my finger, where I got bit, and thinking that I should have checked with Roxanne to make sure Valerie’s rabies shots were up-to-date.

“Sometimes you really don’t seem like a very nice person,” Tammy said. “I know this isn’t who you are, really. But at a moment like this, I don’t like you very much.”

If I was home, this would have been the moment to turn on the TV, get a cold one from the fridge, and take in a ball game. As it was, I just put in my earbuds and gripped the wheel.

LORRAINE

From when he was a little boy, I could always tell if Kevin was troubled. He had this thing he’d do, this certain way he’d rub the side of his nose with his pointer finger. He was doing it on one of their Instagram messages. I sent him a message.

“We could buy you a plane ticket,” I told him. “Don’t worry about the van. We can work that out later. Come home to your family. The door is always open.”

If only he’d taken me up on that. My son would still be alive. Her too, I guess.

KEVIN

Everybody has their limit. Tammy pushed me to mine.

We’d been headed west, but there was some butte Tammy wanted to see in Wyoming, so we circled back. That’s where we were when the fight broke out.

The park ranger that issued us our day pass made some comment about Tammy’s skin being so fair, she should be sure to put on sunscreen.

“You’ve got such great skin,” he said. “I’d hate to see you get burned.”

“He was coming on to you,” I told her.

“So what if he was?” Tammy said. “It’s a lot nicer having a guy give me a compliment than having you complaining that I spend too much money on tofu.”

I thought I’d change the topic. I’d been monitoring our expenditures, and it was getting pretty obvious we were going through our funds a lot faster than we’d planned. “You know organic blueberries cost practically twice as much as the regular kind?” I said.

I told her we had to cut back.

She told me it was important, not putting anything that wasn’t good for her into her body.

“Like me?” I said. “Am I in that category?”

“Sex, sex, sex,” she said. “You’re putting pressure on me.” She told me she was sorry, but she had to work through some issues.

“While you’re working through your issues, I’m starting to worry that pretty soon I’ll have a petrified dick on my hands.”

In the video we posted that night, Tammy and I were roasting marshmallows with a great view of Medicine Bow Peak rising up in the distance.

“You’re not even looking,” I told her. “You’re on your phone so much these days.”

This was kind of ironic, because sometimes she said the same thing about me. The truth is we both spent a lot of time on our devices. The difference being that I was using mine more and more to check out the baseball scores or read some text from my mom, where all Tammy ever seemed to think about now was building our career. Her career, anyway.

“For your information, we’re influencers,” I told her, after she mentioned how I kept checking my screen too. “My phone is how I stay in touch with our followers.”

“You may be staying in touch with our followers,” she said. “But you sure aren’t in touch with me.”

That night I promised myself I’d get back to doing yoga with Tammy again instead of staying in bed while she went through her twenty-five sun salutations every morning. I was even going to try meditating again. I’d lay off trying to have sex. Strangely enough, that part was getting easier. Something had started to happen where every time I looked at Tammy now, all I saw was this person with all these to-do lists about food and exercise and getting followers. Everything on her list but me.

Roxanne checked in again, and the two of them—Roxanne and Tammy—texted back and forth for a while. Evidently Roxanne was hoping to meet up with us again at another campsite.

Great.

I guess I said some things I shouldn’t have. The conversation about this Roxanne chick segued into a sex conversation—I guess along the lines of maybe she was frigid, or a lesbian. Before I knew it, Tammy was crying. She took off on a run.

Listen. I loved Tammy. Naturally, I started feeling bad about upsetting her. So I got this idea to surprise her by cleaning the whole camper van. If you want to know the truth, Tammy was kind of a slob, which was a shock for someone like me whose mom would vacuum up a popcorn kernel the second it hit the rug. I figured if I didn’t take the situation in my own hands, the van would have looked like a dump.

I emptied all the storage bins in the van and dusted them. I shook the granola crumbs out of our beds. (Two beds. No comment.) I vacuumed the whole vehicle, top to bottom. Sprayed disinfectant over everything.

Tammy was pretty sweaty when she came back. She burst into the van with her dirty sneakers still on and flopped down on the bench in the breakfast nook. She didn’t even notice all my hard work.

I guess I yelled. I should’ve used a softer tone of voice but I was frustrated. I’d just spent two hours going over every square inch of the Sprinter and in the first five seconds back she’d managed to scatter a bunch of dirt all over the place, in addition to throwing her dirty socks on the floor.

I told her I didn’t appreciate how she messed up the van. She said what about all the times I left McDonald’s wrappers around. Not to mention I shouldn’t be eating that junk in the first place. Then she burst into tears.

One thing that rubs me the wrong way is when a girl starts blubbering. But I still kept my cool. I put in my earbuds and stepped outside. I figured I’d give Tammy some space.

She came after me. “You always shut me out,” she said. “You don’t listen to my feelings.”

I started doing my push-ups. She didn’t appreciate this at the time, but I was trying to keep from yelling back. I figured the best thing to do was ignore her, but that only made her crazier.

“Why can’t you just look at me?”

“If you could see yourself, you’d know why,” I told her. This interrupted the flow of my exercise routine, naturally. I grabbed my cell phone and started making a video of her—not for our followers, just for her to see her own self. I wouldn’t have put it past Tammy to take out her own phone at this point and start making an Instagram story of us to show the world.

She started grabbing her own hair like she was trying to pull it out. “You’re hysterical,” I said.

Maybe I thought this would bring her to her senses, but it had the opposite effect. She yanked open the van door, picked up a bag of granola, and poured it out on the floor I’d just finished vacuuming.

“You’re out of control,” I said. I was staying very calm. I guess this made her even madder.

“I’d rather be someone like me, who feels things, than you, acting numb all the time.”

Tammy started saying all sorts of other stuff then. Somewhere in there she mentioned my mother, but I’d rather not repeat what she said in that regard. The words “mama’s boy” may have come up. She even brought Roxanne and Valerie into the discussion. The way I made fun of Roxanne just because she was a little overweight, when she was such a kind, compassionate person, not to mention vegetarian and a dog lover.

At this point Tammy was crying so hard she didn’t even look like herself anymore. I kept the camera on my phone pointed at her face. I figured she might come to her senses if I told her how pathetic she looked. This was when she hit me.

Truthfully, it was nothing. More like she was swatting a fly. But after everything I’d just done for Tammy, cleaning up the van, making her bed, I’d reached my limit.

I grabbed her arm. All I intended to do was keep her from flailing around more and making an even bigger mess, but maybe I overdid it. All I was doing was defending myself, but somewhere along the line her wrist must have gotten twisted.

She scratched my face. I still have a mark from her fingernail.

All this time, we were standing outside the van. Given all that was going on with Tammy and me, I didn’t notice, but evidently someone in a car driving past must have seen us and they decided to call 911. Next thing you know, a police car’s pulling up.

A couple of officers got out—a man and a woman. They talked to Tammy first. They said to stay a few yards away.

Tammy was talking very softly then. She said she had these issues with her emotions sometimes, and they got out of hand. She told the police officers it was all a misunderstanding. She admitted it was all her fault.

“I need to work on myself,” Tammy said. “I’ve got some mental health issues. Sometimes I get a little hysterical.”

I stood there, cool, calm, and collected. There was some blood on my cheek from Tammy’s fingernail, so I asked one of the officers—the woman—if she had a Kleenex.

When the police officers were done taking Tammy’s statement, they told her to sit in the car and try to calm down. “Take some deep breaths,” the woman said.

The male police officer came over to me. It was actually a pleasant conversation. The male officer was telling me he understood how these things happen. His wife used to go off on him like that sometimes too. His ex-wife, he said. We shared a chuckle over that.

“Maybe it’s her time of the month, huh?” he told me. He gave me a punch in the arm, not to hurt, more like what a couple of guys do on the basketball court when one of them makes a good play. Or if you meet up with a buddy in a bar. “Hang tough, man,” he said. “Keep it mellow.”

Before the police officers left, one of them—the guy—pointed to the Marlins sticker on the window of the Sprinter.

“How about that Trevor Rogers?” he said. “Did you catch his ninety-eight-mile-per-hour fastball at the All-Stars?”

REPORTER

Recently released footage has come to light, from the bodycams of two officers who interacted with the young couple on their travels. One officer on the scene indicated that she expressed concern with her partner over Tammy Partridge’s mental state at the time. The other officer on the scene offered his impression that Tammy was simply overreacting to the stress of being on the road. The temperature was close to one hundred degrees at the time, reported the second police officer. “In weather like that, anyone might get a little hot and bothered,” the officer remarked. “I got the impression that the young adult male, Mr. Canner, was trying his best to calm the young woman down.”

KEVIN

That night we made a video of a sunset to post on @kevinandtammylove, with the two of us holding hands. I grilled a couple of veggie burgers, but Tammy said she wasn’t hungry and headed to bed.

The next morning she was the most loving she’d been in a long time. We did yoga together and posted a quote from a book Tammy brought along called Bright New Day.

I went for a run. Tammy spent the whole morning writing me a long letter about how sorry she was that she scraped her fingernail on my face. “I don’t know what gets into me,” she wrote in her letter. “I get so confused sometimes.” She posted about the importance of yoga and meditation to keep your emotions in check.

That night on the phone with her parents, I heard her tell her father, “I don’t know what I’d ever do without Kevin. He keeps me in line.”

“I’m an idiot,” she said, after she got off the phone. “I’ve got the most wonderful boyfriend, so why do I go crazy sometimes?”

That day on the highway, when the police came, was all her fault, she told me. It was her anxiety disorder kicking in. When we got home, she should probably start seeing a therapist.

“I’m just messed up,” she told me. “I’m so lucky to have a partner like you to keep me from getting out of control.”

But two days later—still in Wyoming, fixing our dinner of kale salad and garbanzo beans, followers up to 1,194—Tammy started in on me again. “I’ve been thinking about what our next step should be, as influencers, once this trip is over,” she said. “We can’t just drive around America forever.

“We’ll need something big,” she told me. “Like a wedding proposal on the top of Mount Whitney, when we get to California.” She had this idea that I could do something cute where I’d hand her one of her favorite yogurt and granola parfaits and, at the bottom, there’d be a ring.

“We could get a cheap one for now, as a stand-in,” she said. “And change it out with a real diamond later, when our Instagram account takes off.”

We’d get a puppy, finally. Then there’d be our first apartment. Shopping for the dress. The post where we showed her doing that was sure to get a lot of hits.

The wedding would be a real crowd-pleaser, naturally. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but people would go crazy when we announced we were pregnant.

I could have made some remark like, “Is it going to be a virgin birth?” but I was over it. All I wanted at that moment was to be back home with my parents watching a ball game.

I don’t know what happened to me then, but it was like the sides of the camper van started closing in on me—the roof even, pressing down on my head.

“I’m just thinking about our future as influencers,” she said. “Where we go from here. How we build to the next level. It’s okay that we’re starting off a little slow. The engagement is going to be huge. People love a love story.”

We’d always travel, she said. That was an important part of our brand. But once we had kids, we’d pull back on that, at least until they got past the toddler stage. “At some point”—she was talking a ways down the line, when we were thirty-five or something—“some boat manufacturer might give us a big sailboat, and we could sail around to a bunch of islands in the Caribbean. Our followers would love that.”

The next words out of my mouth came as a surprise, even to me. “Fuck our followers,” I told her. “I don’t want to live my whole life like it’s a show. Not even a show. A commercial.”

“I thought this was our dream,” she said. “A shared aspiration.”

“All I really wanted was to have a road trip and get laid. If we got some free stuff along the way, cool.”

Tammy’s face had turned red. It wasn’t a good look. “I never made a fuss about how I had to come up with all our healthy meal choices, and demonstrate the yoga poses, and find the inspirational quote of the day. I didn’t even mention it, times you snuck a Diet Coke or a handful of candy from your secret stash. I accepted it that you don’t know how to fix things when they break and you weren’t into posting as much as me. The way I’ve looked at this, from the beginning, was that we were a single unit, Kevin and Tammy. Tammy and Kevin. We’re this couple America is going to fall in love with.”

“It’s a little hard expecting anybody to fall in love with us when we haven’t even fallen in love with each other,” I said.

“What about our Sprinter van?” she said. “I made it into this beautiful little home for the two of us.”

“Who paid for the goddamn Sprinter van?” I yelled.

“Well, actually,” she said. Her voice got really quiet all of a sudden, which turned out to be worse than if she’d yelled back. “Your parents did. When I think about it, you’ve had other people do things for you all your life.”

“Most people, when they go on a road trip with the person they’re going to get married to, have sex along the way,” I said to her. “Instead of texting some middle-aged fatty with a yappy dog, exchanging tofu recipes.”

“Roxanne and I don’t just exchange recipes,” Tammy said. “We talk about our lives. She tells me real things, like how worried she is about Valerie’s wheezing, and how she got diarrhea at the Grand Tetons. She was so worried Valerie was going to die. She said, ‘If she dies, I’m not sure I can go on living.’”

“There’s no if about it,” I told Tammy. “Dogs die. If a dog’s twelve years old, he’s probably going to kick the bucket pretty soon.”

“Valerie’s a girl,” Tammy said. “A girl dog.”

“Right,” I told her. “They call that a bitch.”

“How did you get so mean?” she said. “I never knew you were mean.”

“I just don’t appreciate some old bag horning in on my life,” I told her. I said “my life” now, not ours. It was occurring to me that we were never what you could call a couple. Like my parents, or other people’s parents.

“You know what I think?” I said. “This Roxanne person screwed everything. Her and her dog. We were doing fine until the two of them showed up.”

Tammy just looked at me. A few seconds before this she had picked up her phone like she might record this to post as one of our “authentic moments.” Then she put it down.

“That chick is fat and ugly and old,” I said. “She talks to that dog like it’s a person.”

“She says I’m her one friend.”

“The chick’s a lesbo,” I said. “I knew it. Next thing you know, she’ll be inviting you to go with her to some hot spring where the two of you can take off all your clothes and sit around naked discussing your chakras.”

“Maybe that wouldn’t be so terrible,” Tammy said. “Maybe she has something to offer that a person like you wouldn’t understand. Like a soul, for instance. As opposed to a penis.”

I have a hard time remembering the next part. I sort of blanked out at this point. More of the things Tammy said had been getting under my skin—like how I shouldn’t drink so much Diet Coke and I should meditate more, things about my mother, and how maybe no other woman besides her was ever going to be good enough for me. What was I going to do, let my parents take care of me my whole life?

But what she said about Roxanne having something more to offer than me, that took me to a new place. When she said that, I could feel the blood rushing into my face. I wanted to smash something.

“Roxanne has the same Mary Oliver book I have on my Kindle,” she said. “When was the last time you read a poem? When was the last time you read anything?”

She said maybe we would have gotten more followers on our account if I’d taken my spiritual practice more seriously, but she could tell I wasn’t really into it. She’d seen the McDonald’s wrappers in the van, from the times I’d snuck off for a normal burger and fries.

“You keep talking about how we don’t have sex,” she said. “The funny thing is, I’m not sure you actually want to anyway. Maybe it’s convenient for you, that I wanted to wait. It takes you off the hook from having to actually consider the needs of another human being besides yourself.”

This was where I reached for my earbuds. Only Tammy got to them first.

“Sometimes I wonder if our whole relationship is just something we made up on Instagram,” Tammy said. She was trying so hard to create this beautiful online picture of the two of us, she said. This persona. She wasn’t even sure anymore who we really were.

“Actually, I think I do know who you are,” she said. “You’re just this spoiled, scared, bored little person that can’t think up anything on his own so he goes along on someone else’s ride.”

She pulled my bandanna off my head. “I never told you this before,” she said. “But everybody knows you’re bald under this. You never fooled anybody.”

I was looking at her neck. I was looking at the necklace I gave her with the amethyst heart, the gold chain. The picture came to me of what would happen if I pulled really hard on that chain. If I kept pulling it tighter and tighter. It was like a time my parents took my brother and me to the Empire State Building for spring vacation when I was six and he was just a baby, and I was standing at the top, looking over the railing, and I kept picturing how easy it would be to pick him up out of the stroller and throw him over the edge. Not that I ever would have done that. It was just this weird thought that came to me.

I must have gone into some kind of altered state, like I was on drugs. Like it wasn’t even me anymore. I was just watching what I was doing like it was a livestream on Instagram.

I was Valerie. Tammy was the steak.

Her lips were moving, but I wasn’t taking in the words anymore. I just kept thinking about how skinny her neck was, and how it reminded me of a chicken, and how easy it would be to snap. I kept looking at that chain I gave her with the little heart dangling down against her throat. Back when I gave her that necklace, that night we got the Sprinter, she seemed like such a sweet person. I wanted that person back.

“What do you want from me anyway?” I asked her. I was holding on to the chain. Then I was pulling it.

“I just want you to be like the man in our videos, who holds my hand and sits on a boulder with me looking at the sunset together,” she said. “I want you to be the way you are in front of the camera, but in real life. When we turn our phones off, everything changes. I don’t even know which is the real you.”

I could have said the same thing to her, actually.

I thought about the guy, Chad, who built the fire and talked with Tammy about kombucha. I could hear Tammy laughing with the solo van dwellers—about me, probably, and how I didn’t know how to connect the propane tanks. I heard my mother’s voice telling me, “She doesn’t appreciate you.”

Then the picture came to me again of Valerie diving for the meat on the grill. Her beady eyes, her sharp little teeth.

I didn’t mean to hurt Tammy. I was just frustrated. Something about the sight of that chain with the stupid heart dangling down on her pale, freckled skin just did something to me. I wanted to yank it off her. Then I pulled tighter. I guess I pulled really hard, because the chain broke. That’s when I put my hands around her neck.

At first she fought back, but not as much as you’d think. She had this look on her face, like a cartoon character that got hit over the head. Like more than anything else, she was just surprised. Her eyes got really big, and her mouth was open, but for once she didn’t say anything. I guess she fought back, but at that point I didn’t even notice. I was in this whole other world where it was just me there, with fingers digging into her small pink neck and my thumbs pushing down, at that spot where the amethyst heart used to lie against her skin. Like Tammy wasn’t even there, like I was in some video game, only it was real.

It didn’t last that long. She made this funny little whimpering noise like a puppy that needs to be let out. Then she wasn’t making any noise at all anymore. Her whole body went limp and she dropped.

I said, “Oh shit.” I didn’t need to check for a pulse. I knew there wasn’t going to be any.

LORRAINE

It isn’t easy becoming an influencer. It’s not enough to rope in all these followers. Once you do that, you’ve got to keep them engaged, which evidently means posting two times a day. Three, when possible. As my son Kevin put it one time, “You’ve got to feed the beast.” Meaning provide new content for all those followers out there waiting to see what he and Tammy were going to do next.

Okay, maybe they didn’t have all that many followers. But their numbers had been moving up. I was always checking my phone to see how they were doing, and if any of their posts looked like they might catch on. Going viral. If you’re an influencer, that’s the name of the game.

Then all of a sudden, nothing. A day goes by. Two. Still no posts. I told myself the kids were just out of cell range, but by day four with no calls home and no Instagram videos, I knew something was wrong.

Tammy’s parents, Roger and Deb, called us. Fred and I never had much in common with the Partridges. Frankly, we always thought Kevin could do better than Tammy, but we tried to stay out of it. Then all of a sudden, her parents were on the phone all the time wanting to know if we’ve heard from our son. Then Deb’s saying she could tell something was wrong just from watching @kevinandtammylove, and Roger’s telling us our son’s a spoiled baby. From the sound of him, he’d had a couple of drinks.

“You know more than you’re telling us,” he said. “I’m guessing that entitled brat of yours is using your credit card to gas up the van. So how about telling us where the last place was that they filled their tank?”

Was this their business? I had nothing to say to those two.

Another day went by. That’s when Roger and Deb reported their daughter to the police as a missing person. That’s when all hell broke loose.

KEVIN

Obviously, this was the worst thing that ever happened to me. The whole thing was an accident, but I felt sick about what happened.

The part about disposing of . . . finding a final resting place . . . for her body . . . Frankly, that part is just too painful to talk about. I wrapped her in her yoga blanket and drove into the mountains, to a quiet place where there weren’t any people around. I tried to imagine where Tammy would want to be. Tammy loved sunshine.

There weren’t any flowers around, but I found this really nice stone. Before I left her, I said a prayer.

I drove all night, and through the next day. Somewhere in Ohio, or maybe Indiana, I sent Tammy’s parents a text from her phone, like it was Tammy that wrote it. Having a great time. Wish you were here. I tried to think of something else Tammy might have said if she was texting her mom and dad, and I knew there wouldn’t be any helpful quotes on BestCaptions.com. Finally I came up with something.

I saw a really cute dog today, and a rainbow. I love Kevin so much.

LORRAINE

Next thing you know, that Sprinter van was pulling up in our driveway and there’s Kevin getting out of the driver’s seat. He looked like he’d lost ten pounds.

I had no clue how he made it all the way back without getting stopped, given that by then the police were looking for his vehicle, but all I cared about at this point was we had our son home. He’d driven all the way on back roads.

He had a scar on his cheek. He didn’t want to tell us about that, but finally he admitted she did that to him. He’d cleaned up the van to make her happy and calm her down, and she’d attacked him with her bare hands.

We asked him where Tammy was, naturally. “She took off,” he said. I knew I shouldn’t ask him more. He was in too much pain.

As the days passed, with Tammy’s family not getting any more texts from her and nobody knowing where she was, the pressure got worse. All kinds of law enforcement officers wanted to talk to us. Who they really wanted to talk to was our son. But they had no body. No proof of a crime. No charges.

No way was Kevin talking to them.

This was hard on my son. He told us he had no idea where Tammy was. She’d taken off on a hike and never came back to their vehicle. He’d gone out looking for her, waited days. Nothing. Finally, all he could do was come home.

The Partridges wouldn’t leave us alone. Then what do you know? They show up on Good Morning America and Dr. Phil. “Kevin’s not coming forward with the information,” they said. Like it was our son’s responsibility that their daughter started attacking Kevin, throwing granola around, and then took off. Like she was the one who got scratched by a fingernail until blood came out.

Somewhere around the one-week mark, the news came out about the police officers who pulled the kids over after they had their little spat. It seemed like more people watched that bodycam footage on television than tuned in to the All-Star game—the part with Tammy in the back seat of the police cruiser telling the officers how she’d gone crazy and attacked Kevin, and where she herself admitted she needed therapy.

Then there was our Kevin, in the same bodycam footage, standing outside the van while Tammy sat in the back seat bawling her eyes out, calmly explaining to the officer that it was okay, the injury she’d given him wasn’t serious, they should leave well enough alone. He had the situation under control, even though Tammy had inflicted an injury to his face. You tell me, who was the crazy person in that story.

By this point everyone all over America was looking for Tammy. The police, the FBI, but regular people too. They started posting her picture on their Twitter and Instagram feeds along with the 800-number to call if anyone wanted to report any sightings.

Some woman in Nebraska said she’d seen a young woman matching Tammy’s description at a Cheesecake Factory. A man in Illinois said he’d given her a lift hitchhiking. He’d dropped her off at a rest stop in Michigan. Somebody started a “Find Tammy Partridge” website. A psychic said she had a vision that Tammy had gotten together with a man at a truck stop and was now riding on the back of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle somewhere in Baja California. Some creep who called herself @valeriediscoversamerica was on Instagram calling our son a murderer.

Nobody had any evidence that a crime had been committed, so they weren’t charging Kevin with anything. Between ourselves, Fred and I had to wonder whether this whole thing—Tammy disappearing the way she did—was some kind of stunt to get her more followers.

Of course, people were dragging Kevin’s name through the mud. A guy at our country club he used to play golf with went on the news to say how Kevin used to move the ball sometimes before taking his shot. Someone got hold of a picture from a Halloween party a few years earlier where Kevin dressed up as Freddy Krueger. Next thing we know, we open the morning paper and there’s our son, looking like this psycho killer, not bothering to mention it was just a costume.

A local TV crew came to the house to interview Fred and me. We didn’t let them in the house. Nobody had charged anybody with any crime. Why should we talk to these people? We kept the door shut and closed the blinds. Every day at five o’clock, we ordered two steak and onion pizzas, extra cheese, delivered to the back door.

After he returned from the road trip, alone, Kevin mostly stayed in his room, watching Marlins games and videos. Fred and I didn’t make an issue of this. He’d been through enough. We gave him space. The boy was traumatized. Other than the time when the pizza delivery guy came around, we barely laid eyes on our older son. As for Henry: for him it was nothing new to stay in his room all day. Henry never went anywhere. Every night I set a few slices of pizza by his door, along with two cans of Diet Coke. Other than the glow from his computer monitor and the sound of clicking on the keyboard, you’d never know anyone was there.

On day eight of having our son back, the news broke. They’d found Tammy’s body under a yoga blanket at the bottom of a ravine somewhere in eastern Utah. Maybe we should have known by that point that she wasn’t coming home alive, but naturally we felt sad. Whether or not we thought she was the greatest choice for him to date, not even factoring in that she abused our son, we never wanted her to die.

When we told Kevin the news, he didn’t say anything. That’s Kevin for you. He’d always been highly sensitive, but he kept his feelings to himself. Even when he was little, that age when most children are always crying about something or other, Kevin was the strong, silent type. Stiff upper lip and so on.

Nobody on the police force was saying anything about how Tammy had died, but you wanted to believe it was an accident. I figured she’d probably gone running up in the hills, lost her footing, and took a fall. More than likely some hiker found her and thought to cover her with the blanket.

No wonder our son was in shock. One minute the two of them were off on this romantic trip across America. The next thing you know she shows up dead.

The police held a press conference. When their spokesman stepped up to the microphone, the door to Kevin’s room was still shut, so Fred and I watched on our own. That’s when we heard the word. Homicide.

They were saying Tammy was strangled, and that at the point they’d found her body, she’d probably been dead a minimum of five days. Then came the kicker. Nobody was filing any charges, nobody had a warrant, but law enforcement had named our son a person of interest.

Fred and I just stood there. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Outside on the lawn, we could hear a crowd of people chanting, “Lock him up.” A helicopter was circling the house. Some of the media types were banging on our door. We made sure it was locked.

“We need to tell Kevin what they said at the press conference,” Fred said.

The two of us—Fred and me—climbed the stairs together to Kevin’s room. Up until now we’d chosen to respect his privacy, but this time we opened the door.

The window was open. Our boy was gone. How he’d managed to get away without anyone spotting him is anybody’s guess.

He’d left a note to say he needed to get away for a while, take in some fresh air. With everything that had happened, who could blame him? The poor guy was totally traumatized.

Fred and I were worried sick. There’s a nature preserve called Big Cypress close to the development where we live. Wild, undeveloped swampland. They’ve built some walkways through parts of the preserve, but basically, between the mosquitos and the heat, the place is uninhabitable. When our boys were little, we sometimes took them there, but never for more than an hour or two. Longer and the bugs would eat you alive.

In his note, Kevin said he was heading to Big Cypress Swamp to try to get his head straight. We figured he’d be back by dinnertime at the latest, not that the boy had any appetite since he’d been home. My big worry at that point was how he’d get through the crowd of reporters and lookie-loos on our front lawn.

Dinnertime came and went, no Kevin. Ten o’clock, he still hadn’t shown up. At midnight Fred and I went to bed. Not that either of us could sleep. We just lay there in the darkness thinking about our son and praying he’d found a safe spot to spend the night.

Sometime before dawn, Fred got out of bed. I could hear him on the stairs. Then he came back to our room.

“My gun’s gone,” he said.

By the next day, the crowd on our front lawn was three times what it had been the day before. Someone had made a kind of altar with a giant picture of Tammy and all these stuffed animals under a painting someone made of a rainbow. Many fans had remembered, from reading Tammy’s posts, that she loved heart-shaped rocks. Now there were a few hundred of them, arranged under Tammy’s photograph, with a quote from one of her posts on @kevinandtammylove: GOODNESS AND LOVE ARE EVERYWHERE IF YOU JUST LOOK FOR THEM. There must have been close to a thousand people holding signs that said JUSTICE FOR TAMMY. Almost as many people as Kevin and Tammy had roped in during their time as influencers, come to think of it.

Somewhere along the line, her fans had created a new name for Tammy: they called her the Rainbow Girl. They called Kevin “murderer.”

I wanted to throw the door open and scream at them. What about justice for my son? He was a person too. What about innocent until proven guilty? Which he never would be, not in a million years.

At just this moment a Jeep pulled up in front of the house—bright orange, with these giant monster-truck tires, and a guy got out who we recognized from TV. It was Wildman Willy, from that show on cable. Through the blinds, Fred and I could see a crew setting up a camera and sound equipment. Next thing you know, they’re filming a show on our lawn. Henry watched it online later that night.

“Check this out,” he called out to us from his room.

I probably hadn’t set foot in Henry’s room for a year at that point, but I did. There was Henry, bent over his computer monitor as usual, with his can of Diet Coke. On the screen, there stood Wildman Willy, with his “Expect to fry” and “GOTCHA” tattoos clearly visible under his trademark cowhide vest, standing next to our mailbox, talking about how he was going to track Kevin down and bring him to justice.

“Some people would like to carry this punk off right now and hang him from the nearest tree,” Wildman Willy was saying. “But that’s not how we do things in the United States of America. My team and I will bring this lowlife scumbag in if we have to pull him by his earlobes. Our law enforcement can take it from there.

“You can run but you can’t hide from Wildman Willy,” he said, which was evidently the slogan that started his show every week. Then he looked straight into the camera.

“I’m talking to you, Kevin Canner. If you’re watching this, you’re on notice. My team of world-class bounty hunters, trained in the jungles and on some of the roughest terrain on the planet, will smoke you out and bring you in like a freshly harpooned fish. Expect to fry.”

Hearing this, Henry made no comment, as usual. Fred and I just looked at each other. This was our son he was talking about. The good son. The one we’d pinned our hopes on.

Once they had a body, the police got a search warrant to check out the Sprinter, but it didn’t tell them anything. Kevin’s fingerprints were all over the van, but why wouldn’t they be?

At this point they explained that our son was obligated to talk with them. This information came to us through Fred’s golfing buddy, Gordon, who’s an attorney. Gordon’s normal line of work is personal injury law, but Fred had hired him to field all the calls.

“Listen, I know there’s no way Kev has anything to do with what happened to Tammy,” Gordon told us. “But at this point he’s got to answer questions from the investigators. Tell them what he knows.”

This was when we had to explain. Kevin was missing. That he never came back from the swamp.

GORDON

When Lorraine and Fred explained that Kevin was missing, I had to ask, how was this possible? With all the media and law enforcement outside, not to mention the crowds?

“He must have snuck out the back door,” Fred told me.

This seemed hard to believe. But what was I supposed to say?

“If you say so.”

LORRAINE

Next day, Wildman Willy heads off to Big Cypress with his camera crew. There’s all these amateur detectives sniffing around too. People were starting their own Instagram pages with sightings they thought might be Kevin.

None of us set foot outside the door. We were prisoners in our home—Fred sitting in front of the TV set, tuned to the Weather Channel. All I knew to do was clean the house. But there comes a point when you don’t have anything left to clean. You keep vacuuming anyway.

Henry just sat in front of his computer, like always, doing god-knows-what that I never could make sense of. Five p.m., when dinnertime rolled round, we sent out for the pizza.

KEVIN

Man, these mosquitos in this place. Who needs a gun to finish themselves off? The bugs will do the job for you.

From the looks of things, my battery’s going to give out on me any second now. So I’d better wrap this up. I just want to say I’m sorry. Number one, I’m sorry about ruining my parents’ lives, which I know will happen once they find out I’m dead. I’m sorry for what happened to Tammy. A lot of unfortunate events transpired, that’s all, and I don’t see any way of dealing with them. I’m sorry to all the Instagram followers at @kevinandtammylove. I know we let you down.

Not that it matters, but you know something crazy? Just before I started recording my final message to the world before blowing my brains out, I decided to check @kevinandtammylove. There haven’t been any new posts, obviously. But in the last five days alone, we’ve gotten three million new followers. We finally went viral.

It might sound nuts, but I think Tammy would be happy about that. I think Tammy would—

At this point, the recording stops. It would appear that Kevin’s battery must have died.

LORRAINE

For all those days, as the police and FBI searched the swamp, Fred and I kept ourselves sealed off from the law enforcement people. Fred’s friend Gordon, who was monitoring social media, kept telling us how bad it looked, the two of us not talking to anyone. Tammy’s parents went on CBS Morning News and Live with Kelly and Ryan. Sitting side by side in the studio with one of the hosts—I haven’t been able to keep them straight since the Kathie Lee days—they were saying it was unforgivable how any parents (this would be Fred and me) could refuse to cooperate in the investigation of their daughter’s murder.

Don’t get me wrong. I feel for Tammy’s mom and dad. But can’t they understand, we’re dealing with a lost child too? We’ve got our own tragedy going on.

Gordon came by. Just letting him in the door without a dozen people pushing on past him was tough, but we managed.

“You’ve got to make a statement,” he said. “It looks very bad if you don’t. You need to cooperate with the police.”

We went one better. We told the officers who spoke with us that we’d accompany them to the swamp. Not that we held out much hope anymore that, after seven days in the Big Cypress Swamp, Kevin could still be alive in that place, but we were sick of all those people on social media saying we were these terrible people. Gordon called a press conference to make it clear that my husband and I wanted to assist law enforcement in the search for our son.

That afternoon I put on bug repellent and a long-sleeved jacket and pants, even though the temperature was up around a hundred. Fred did the same. One of the officers drove with us in a patrol car to join the others involved in the search. There must have been fifty men out there looking for any trace of Kevin, not to mention more helicopters with heat-seeking equipment designed to detect the presence of—do you have any idea how hard it is for me to say this word?—a body.

REPORTER

Earlier this afternoon a development took place in the search for Kevin Canner, the missing person of interest in the murder of twenty-three-year-old Tammy Partridge, the young internet influencer whose body was discovered in the Utah wilderness less than two weeks ago.

After nine days and hundreds of man-hours during which teams of trained officers have continued to conduct an exhaustive search in the Big Cypress Swamp for the missing man, a crucial piece of evidence has been discovered that appears to resolve, at last, the case that has occupied all of America for days.

Shortly before noon today, the mother of the missing man discovered a backpack containing Kevin Canner’s cell phone less than four hundred feet from the entrance to the swamp.

It remains a mystery how officers conducting their investigation of the scene failed to detect the presence of Canner’s backpack until now. A gun belonging to Canner’s father was located at the scene, though authorities overseeing the investigation have expressed doubt that the body of the young man now believed to have killed Tammy Partridge will ever be located.

It is the hope of every officer involved in the investigation of this event that the contents of a message believed to have been recorded by Kevin Canner in the final moments of his life may offer some measure of closure concerning the tragic loss of Tammy—the Rainbow Girl, a young woman who, in her final days, reminded America of its vast natural beauty, and who never stopped seeking out rainbows.

ROXANNE

So I guess it’s time to explain what happened concerning the final hours of Kevin Canner, until this very moment known only to me. You might call this a confession. But if anybody out there, watching this, thinks they’re going to track me down, think again. I had a friend explain to me how to post these videos without giving away my true location. Just because you can see Valerie running on a beach doesn’t mean anyone will ever know where it’s located. There’s thousands of beaches on this big wide planet of ours. A few million miles of sand.

We have to rewind here. Valerie and I had been doing our thing, making our way across the country, minding our business, and following the tracks of @kevinandtammylove. I’d been concerned for a while about whether Kevin was a good person or not. But it wasn’t until we reached Idaho that the shit hit the fan.

That night at the campground, I had no intention of introducing myself to @kevinandtammylove. Valerie and I were just going to eat our dinner, same as always. Have a little wine by the campfire. A dog treat for Valerie. Call it a day.

Then we smelled a steak on the grill, and before I could stop her, Valerie took off. That girl made a beeline to where the steak was cooking. As we all know, Valerie loves steak.

That was the only time I ever actually got to spend time with Tammy, even though by this point she felt like family. Kevin was looking at his phone or something. Tammy and I talked about everything. Our childhoods, our hopes and dreams for the future. Life on the road. Poetry. Alternative protein sources. Composting. As sweet and lovable as I’d known she was from her Instagram posts, she turned out to be more so.

I admired her necklace. “Kevin gave it to me,” she said. “Amethyst is my birthstone.” Truth is, I never believed the chain was real gold, and if you ask me, the amethyst was a little on the small side. I just wanted her to feel good.

The conversation came around to dogs, naturally. “Valerie’s a wonderful companion,” I told Tammy. I wanted to tell her, “Ditch the boyfriend and get a Havanese.” But it wasn’t my place.

“I can tell you two have a great thing going,” Tammy said, speaking of Valerie and me. These were words I could not say back, about her and Kevin.

“We’re like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” I said. “Or Thelma and Louise.”

I could tell from Tammy’s expression she didn’t know who that was. She was that young.

“They all ended up dead,” I said. “But they had some really great adventures first.”

When I said that, Tammy got a funny look on her face. “That’s what my dad’s afraid of about our road trip,” she said. “He’s always worried something bad will happen to me.”

“Do you feel unsafe?” I asked her. I was looking hard at Kevin as I asked the question. He was looking at his phone, same as always.

If she’d just told me the truth, I could have saved her. I would have taken her firmly by the hand and the three of us—me, Valerie, and Tammy—could have walked right out of there. Back to my campsite, my car, the teardrop. We could’ve made it to California by daybreak.

But Tammy just laughed. “I’m great,” she said. “Did I tell you we’re influencers?”

“That sounds interesting,” I told her.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But there are difficult aspects. Everything in our life is supposed to be great all the time. Or if it’s not great for a few minutes, we get over it and everything’s fine again. Kevin doesn’t think I should ever talk about the hard parts. If you ask me, admitting the hard parts is what makes people know you’re honest.”

This was when Kevin called to her that he was going to bed.

“You coming?” he said. Like the fact that he wanted to call it a night meant she had to.

“I guess I’d better go,” I told her. I didn’t want to, but I walked back to my camper. Me and Valerie.

Then there we were, back out on the road again, driving along, keeping our distance from Tammy and Kevin’s van—making sure there were always at least three cars separating us.

All of a sudden there they were, pulled over by the side of the road, standing outside the van. He was yelling at her, and she was crying. He was waving his fist in the air. She was burying her face in her hands. That’s when he grabbed her arm and started to twist it. She tried to break free. That must’ve been how she ended up scratching him.

You know who took all this the hardest? Valerie. Her head was sticking out the window, as usual, while the whole episode was going down. She started to bark so loudly I worried Kevin might look up and see us. By this point he would have recognized me.

I picked up my phone. Called 911. “I’d like to report an incident of domestic violence,” I said.

Five minutes later—with my Buick and the teardrop parked at a safe distance—a squad car pulled up. I watched two officers get out of the car and walk over to Kevin and Tammy’s van. She was still crying. But when he saw the police officers approaching, Kevin’s whole way of carrying himself changed. He turned into this easygoing guy, leaning over Tammy with his arm on her shoulder like he was her number one protector.

I’ve seen guys like this. They beat up on their partner one minute, next thing you know they’re acting all normal and together while she’s freaking out, looking like the one who’s nuts. Behind every crazy-acting woman there’s a cool, calm, and collected man looking like he’s Mr. Wonderful.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying, naturally. I didn’t get to watch the bodycam footage until later, on TV. We’re talking a few weeks, after they’d found Tammy’s body and the police were finally putting two and two together that maybe Kevin wasn’t this wonderful, concerned boyfriend they’d let off the hook back on the highway that day.

Too little too late. You can’t trust the police to take care of things like this. If you want a job done right, do it yourself.

Now that he’d seen me, I couldn’t risk Kevin recognizing my teardrop at some campsite, so as the sun went down, when I saw them turning into another campsite, I made sure to pull in next to one of those ridiculously large RVs to remain under cover. I was no good to Tammy unless I stayed close.

I had to get Valerie settled into her bed. I put her favorite squeeze toy in next to her and walked over to where Kevin and Tammy were set up.

There were no stars that night. I walked back over to Kevin and Tammy’s campsite. I hid in the cover of darkness.

As I neared the spot where their Sprinter van was parked, I could hear them talking. More accurate, I heard Kevin talking in that high, thin voice of his while she was busy preparing their dinner, from the sound of things.

It took me a minute but all of a sudden I got it that he was talking about me.

“Most people, when they go on a road trip with the person they love, don’t spend their time exchanging tofu recipes with some middle-aged fatty with a yappy dog.”

Then Tammy’s voice. Soft, like I remembered it.

“Roxanne and I don’t just discuss healthy cooking,” Tammy said. “We share our feelings, like how worried she is about Valerie wheezing and how she got diarrhea at the Grand Tetons.”

There was some noise then. Pans clattering. Then I heard Kevin saying Valerie’s name. He called her a bitch.

I just stood there, taking it all in. I wanted to go for his throat but I just stood there.

“Sometimes I’m not sure you’re a very nice person,” Tammy told Kevin. Her voice was so quiet I could just barely make out the words. “Sometimes I wonder if I even love you.”

When she said that, something happened. Maybe Kevin grabbed her again. I couldn’t see. Maybe he just gave her a look. That would have been enough. All I could hear for a moment was Tammy, crying.

The whiny voice was gone, but the way he spoke to her then was worse. Like there must be spit coming out of his mouth along with the words.

“I just don’t appreciate some old bag horning in on my life.”

They argued in low voices for a minute, but then Tammy spoke up.

“Maybe she has something to offer that a person like you wouldn’t understand,” Tammy said. “Like a soul, for instance. As opposed to a penis.”

For once her voice sounded strong, the way a person does sometimes when finally, after a long time, she speaks the truth.

“Everybody knows you’re bald under that stupid bandanna,” she said. “You never fooled anybody.”

Then there was no more talking. I heard noises but I couldn’t see what was going on. I wanted to run over there and help her. Here is my shame that I will take to the grave. I couldn’t move.

What happened was, right about then Valerie showed up. She must have gotten out the window of the teardrop and followed me in the darkness. Now she was standing at my feet, barking. Any second now, Kevin would hear her.

Why did it matter? I wasn’t afraid for myself. But I’d seen what Kevin could do when he got mad. I imagined him coming at the two of us, picking up Valerie in those soft, smooth hands of his that looked like he hadn’t done an honest day’s work in his life. All it would take was one good snap to break Valerie’s neck.

Picturing him doing that, I picked Valerie up and got out of there.

Leaving that night. That’s my big regret. I knew Tammy was in danger. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. But I did.

Back in my bed in the teardrop, I thought I heard Tammy’s voice. I told myself it was probably some kind of bird calling out in the night. I thought I heard someone calling. But I told myself it was a dream.

The next morning their van took off before the sun came up. After I heard him pull away, Valerie and I walked over to where the two of them had set up camp, but there was no sign of them. The Sprinter van was gone. Still, Valerie kept running around in circles, like something was wrong, licking my ankles and jumping up like she wanted to tell me something.

“I have a bad feeling,” I told her. “I’m worried about Tammy.”

Valerie started whimpering. She was worried too. Maybe she already knew the truth. She usually did.

You know some of the rest. How Tammy’s parents got worried when they didn’t hear from her. How they reported her as a missing person. Suddenly Kevin and Tammy were all over the news.

You’ve got to admit life is nuts. All those weeks Tammy and Kevin spent, doing everything they could to get people to pay attention to their Instagram feed to increase their number of followers. All of a sudden everyone knew their names. @kevinandtammylove was blowing up.

Then Kevin shows up back at his parents’ house, in the same white van the two of them started out in. Just no Tammy, and the press is going crazy, along with everyone else. The family’s holed up in their house, nobody saying anything. Police can’t do a thing on account of there’s no body. No crime.

Valerie and I knew differently. We might not know where he’d dumped her body, but there was no question Tammy was dead.

We weren’t talking, though. The way I saw it, the best outcome was to take matters into my own hands. When you were dealing with a slimeball like Kevin, you couldn’t count on him not to cook up a cockamamie story about Tammy coming after him with a kitchen knife or something, painting himself as the injured party. He could tell people he killed her by accident, in self-defense. He’d remind them about the incident where she supposedly scraped him with her fingernail and admitted to the cops she had mental problems. Guys like Kevin have a way of getting away with things.

“We’re driving to Florida,” I told Valerie. I didn’t have to say it twice. That girl was ready.

I didn’t have a plan for what we’d do when we both got to Palmetto Shores. To avoid attracting attention, I left the teardrop at a campground a few miles from the house where I gathered Kevin was still holed up with his parents. I drove the Buick to as close as we could get—which turned out to be a few blocks away, given how many people had gathered there, with license plates from all over. Like everyone else, we were waiting for something to happen. Biding our time. For days, we just stood in the Canners’ front yard with everyone else. Nobody noticed us.

When the announcement came that they’d found Tammy’s body, it looked like finally Kevin would have to come out and say something. But he didn’t. What kind of coward hides in his parents’ house when the woman he supposedly loved has been murdered?

Another day passed. People were going crazy, most of all Tammy’s parents. They went on TV demanding answers, but the family stayed inside.

Finally, the autopsy report came in and they called a press conference. Tammy had been strangled. Once they knew they had a homicide on their hands, the police had just cause to interrogate Kevin Canner. Then came another press conference and a whole new bombshell: the Canners announced that Kevin had disappeared earlier that morning. “Our son has been terribly depressed by the death of his beloved girlfriend,” Lorraine Canner said as she stood at the microphone. “He left us a note to say he’d taken a hike to the swamp to clear his head. Given his state of mind, we’re worried sick.”

You had to wonder how Kevin Canner had managed to escape the crowds at the family’s home to go on this hike of his. Nobody had an answer to that one. But once his parents made their announcement, a massive manhunt got underway, covering the twenty-five thousand acres of Big Cypress Swamp.

For seven days, the nature preserve was teeming with almost as many law enforcement agents as there were alligators.

On day eight—still standing vigil at the Canner home, along with a few hundred others—a surprising thing happened. A DM dropped into my Instagram account, @valeriediscoversamerica. In all the time I’d had that account—for no reason other than to follow Tammy and Kevin—I’d never received a message. Never had a follower.

The author of this message was writing to me from Palmetto Shores, Florida—same place I was currently passing my time—under the handle @littlebrother. He’d noticed my posts on @kevinandtammylove, way back when they had only twelve followers. He’d been keeping an eye on me ever since. He didn’t have a dog himself, but if he did, he wrote, Havanese would be his top pick.

@littlebrother wasn’t just anybody’s little brother. He was the little brother of Kevin Canner, and he was writing to me from inside that house.

I think I get where you’re coming from, @littlebrother wrote in his DM. You probably figured out over the course of your travels, following Kevin and Tammy, that Kevin’s basically a class-A asshole, he wrote. Me, I could have told you that when I was four years old.

Have you ever heard of the dark web? he wrote. Let me tell you about it.

Over the course of the next few hours—while Valerie and I stood in the crowd of people, yelling for Fred and Lorraine Canner to show their faces and tell us what they knew concerning the activities of their older son—Henry Canner laid it all out for me. The fake passport his parents had procured for Kevin. (The dark web was good for this.) The plane ticket to the Cayman Islands, booked under Kevin’s new name. The $300,000 in cash soon to be delivered, in care of a pizza delivery boy, to the Canner homestead that night.

The DMs from Henry Canner didn’t stop there. Contrary to what people, including law enforcement, supposed, Kevin had not taken off for the swamp, or any place else. He was holed up at the family home, same as before. The family was simply pretending he’d disappeared with the aim of having the authorities focus their attention elsewhere. Right now, as I’m writing this, he wrote, my parents’ favorite son is down in our basement, watching Jackass reruns with our dad.

I get the feeling you and I might be on the same page when it comes to taking care of my brother, he added. If so, I have a plan.

Twenty-four hours later, we put it into action.

For the first time in all the days that Valerie and I had stood outside the Canner home in the crowd of angry protesters, no pizza delivery boy showed up at five thirty, or at six, or for another three hours after that. It was past nine when a Toyota Corolla with a Domino’s sign on top pulled up alongside the curb and the man stepped out, carrying a box. Henry had already explained to me that the height and build of this particular pizza delivery person would closely resemble that of his brother, Kevin. Their mother had thought of everything.

I knew what to do then. I made my way to the Domino’s delivery vehicle and stepped into the front seat, with Valerie in her carryall bag, as always.

We didn’t have to wait long. Five minutes later, possibly less, a figure emerged from the house, wearing the pizza delivery uniform. The figure made his way to the car. He was carrying a pizza box—unusual, for someone who has just delivered a pizza, but not so bizarre as to attract particular attention—and he was wearing the same kind of hooded sweatshirt of the delivery man from before, which covered his head. I knew that underneath, this person would be bald.

As he approached the driver’s side door of the Corolla, this person—we’re speaking of Kevin Canner, obviously—registered surprise to find me in the driver’s seat. Not that he recognized me at this point. I remained hunched over the wheel, with a scarf around my head and my face concealed in the darkness. I leaned over and opened the door to the back seat. In this British accent I’d picked up from watching Downton Abbey, I told Kevin there’d been a change of plans. I’d be driving him to the airport.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “That wasn’t the plan.”

“We decided it was better if you didn’t drive yourself,” I told him, Downton Abbey–style. “The sooner we get out of here the better.” I was still channeling the old woman, Violet Crawley, from the TV show. In her canvas carryall under the seat, I could hear Valerie panting. I made a panting sound myself, to conceal this. “Asthma,” I said.

From the back seat, I could hear Kevin on his cell phone. “I’m all set, Mom,” he said. “I’ll call you when I land.”

“Miami International, I presume?” I said. My voice sounded sexless enough that a person would hardly know if I were a woman or a man.

There are some advantages to being the kind of person nobody takes any interest in. Henry Canner was not the only nearly invisible person in this story. I was nothing. Only the getaway driver.

Only now Kevin sounded surprised. “Yeah. But first . . . you know . . . like my mom explained . . . we need to make a stop at Big Cypress.”

His younger brother hadn’t told me this part. Nobody had filled Henry in on this aspect of the plan, probably, so it took me a minute to understand what he was talking about. Why would a man that every law enforcement and FBI agent in a thousand-mile radius was looking for want to hightail it to a mosquito-infested swamp in the middle of the night, knowing that, come morning, the place would be crawling again with cops on the lookout for him, not to mention a world-famous bounty hunter and a few dozen amateur sleuths?

He answered my question without my needing to say anything. My face remained well concealed.

“It shouldn’t take more than five minutes,” he said. “I’m just going to stash my backpack there. And the phone.”

“The phone, sir?”

“With the confession,” he said. “The suicide note. My battery died before I finished explaining the whole thing. But I got my point across. Once they finish listening to my voice recording, nobody’s going to be looking for me anymore.”

Something about the situation—maybe it was the night, or the moonlight, or the fact that he’d just left his home forever—seemed to make the guy more loquacious than normal. “People are going to understand that it wasn’t my fault, what happened to Tammy. I just loved her so much and felt so bad about the whole thing I had to kill myself.”

From inside her carrier, I could feel Valerie pawing to get out. She wasn’t happy with what she was hearing, and who would be?

“There will probably be a lot of guys out there who’ll understand I was abused and look at me as a kind of hero,” he added.

This was Kevin Canner for you. Still harboring delusions of glory. Still making excuses for himself. Right up to the moment of a fake suicide set up by his mommy.

“What do you bet they make a movie about our story?” he told me. “I just hope it’s HBO and not Lifetime. I’d like to see Ryan Reynolds play me. Or Bradley Cooper.”

The street in front of the Canner house had been lit up from all the television crews camped out front, the flickering candles of those Tammy fans (“Never forget our Rainbow Girl”), the cell phones of a few hundred people texting messages and checking social media for the latest news. But within a block the street was deserted and, except for a couple of streetlights, it was all too dark to make out anything much.

Never mind. I knew where I was going.

For eight long days, teams of searchers—law enforcement officers, assisted by park rangers, special forces agents, divers and alligator control specialists—had combed the acres of Big Cypress Swamp, looking for Kevin Canner. But now—ten o’clock at night—the preserve was abandoned. A chain had been stretched across the entrance to the swamp.

I stopped the car. We’d take the last few hundred yards on foot. No need to go far for what Kevin intended: He’d be leaving his backpack tucked under a mangrove tree, not so obvious as to arouse total disbelief that the searchers had failed to spot it all those days before, but not so well hidden that someone—his mother, in fact—wouldn’t come upon it easily, at daybreak, when the search resumed.

Kevin hoisted the backpack on his shoulder and stepped out the back of the car. I slipped out of the driver’s seat, with Valerie’s carryall on my arm. No way I was leaving my girl unattended in a swamp filled with alligators.

Just then, Kevin reached into his pocket. He unwrapped a slice of pizza. Even in the heat of the Florida night I could smell it. Not just onions, but steak.

My hand went to the carryall, but it was too late. There was no silencing my brave and hungry little dog. From inside the carryall came the unmistakable sound of a barking Havanese.

A look of undisguised horror came over Kevin’s face then. He looked at the carryall. Then he looked at me. That was when Valerie leaped out of the bag.

“Roxanne,” he said. It was not a question.

In the end, it worked out even better than I’d intended. My original plan was to dispose of Kevin’s body off a jetty someplace, but I hadn’t actually worked out where. It wasn’t going to be easy, getting a man out of the car after I did him in, but after all those years of hoisting packages at the fulfillment center, I figured I could handle some scrawny 140-pound asshole. But this was so much better.

I pulled out my weapon. It was nothing more than the Taser I’d bought for our road trip, in case I had trouble with bears, but Kevin didn’t know that. To him, it might as well have been a Colt .45. I’d stun him with that first. Then slit his throat.

But Kevin had a gun too. His daddy’s, naturally. No doubt the plan called for him to fire a single shot into the water, so that later, when the police found it next to the backpack, there’d be one bullet missing. He would have intended to set the gun down so it looked like it could have slipped from his hand after firing the fatal shot, as he fell into the water. I could just imagine his mother working out the whole thing and lovingly explaining it to him. The lawyer pal arranging for the sale of the family boat—quick, under the table—with a second mortgage on the house. The computer geek brother nobody paid any attention to, off in his room, perusing the dark web for a passport into which they’d insert a photograph of Kevin—but with a new name, and a full head of hair, thanks to the wig his mother had acquired for him.

I stood there looking out at the dark swamp water with that gun at my head. And truthfully, I didn’t care all that much if I lived or died. I just wanted to see the man who’d killed Tammy Partridge get what he deserved, and suddenly it looked like maybe he’d waltz out of that swamp. A free man.

Only one problem. Valerie. She had not forgotten the way he’d waved that spatula at her, that night at the campground. Or the rest of it. This was the guy who’d called her a bitch. She wasn’t going to stand for this piece of shit passing himself off as a human being messing with her again.

I haven’t mentioned this before, but Valerie’s a jumper. That dog may look like a sweet little puffball, but if anybody messes with me, she’ll put her life on the line.

When she needs to, Valerie can practically levitate. Which is what she did then. She launched herself off the ground and went straight for Kevin Canner’s balls. Those sharp teeth of hers grabbed on to his pants, right at crotch level, and sank in hard through the fabric. He let out a cry like you’d think someone was murdering him.

Which someone was about to do.

I didn’t have to finish Kevin off myself, as it turned out. He did it to himself. Tipped over backward into the water. Did I fail to mention, they called this spot Alligator Alley?

For a few seconds there, he stayed mostly above the water, that bald dome of his just barely rising out of the water. He was screaming of course, begging me to pull him out. I seem to recall he said something about there being all this money in that pizza box, and how half of it could be mine.

Wait, wait! Not just half! All!

How about this? I could come along with him to the Cayman Islands. He always had a thing for older women. He was having a hard time getting the words out by this point, but I got the gist.

This part may actually have been true. So long as the older woman was his mom.

This was when I spotted the first alligator. Just his eyes, hovering over the top of the water. Then another pair of eyes. Then there must have been half a dozen alligators moving in.

Word had spread. Asshole in water. There was not a lot of meat on Kevin’s bones, but enough.

He called out to me one more time. “I’ll do anything,” he screamed. “Just get me out of here.”

One of the alligators must have grabbed hold of his leg from below. Or a bunch of them did. They had pulled him down. There was some thrashing then, but it didn’t last all that long. Then just a few ripples on the water. Then it was over.

A little over an hour later, Valerie and I were pulling up at the airport. I gave the car to a valet parker and walked up to the ticket counter.

There was a flight leaving that night for Los Angeles—same place I was supposed to meet up with Ernie, the guy I’d sent the $10,000 to way back when so he could finish his screenplay for Leonardo DiCaprio. This time, with money from the pizza box, I rented us a red Ferrari convertible. Definitely a step up from my old Buick, though I missed my teardrop camper.

Valerie and I visited Universal Studios. I found Bob Barker’s star on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard and took a tour of celebrity homes, my favorite being Patrick Dempsey’s. Valerie ran on the sand at Venice Beach, but she was scared of the waves.

After LA, we made a little road trip of our own in the Ferrari, posting along the way from @valeriediscoversamerica. Mount Rushmore was nothing to write home about, but Crater Lake was amazing, as was Yellowstone. The Mall of America. Not to mention the Grand Canyon and—in Wisconsin—the world’s largest cheese.

On the shores of Lake Superior, Valerie found an old bone. She was still chewing on that thing when we got to Dollywood—a place Tammy had wanted to see on her road trip with Kevin and never got to, which is just one of many examples of how he failed to support her dreams.

Eventually, when the two of us had enough of traveling around, we ditched the rental car and bought ourselves a couple of tickets to someplace whose whereabouts I can’t divulge, for obvious reasons. The island where we make our home now, which is where we’re coming to you on our YouTube channel, has miles of beaches where Valerie loves to run. As you can see from our videos, she’s overcome her fear of the waves.

We’ve rented a sweet little place with a yard for Valerie and a place for me to lay out my yoga mat, if you can believe it. Valerie gets steak every night. I’m still strictly vegetarian.

I keep thinking about Tammy’s goal of influencing people to live healthier lives. What do you know? She succeeded.

Three hundred thousand dollars—minus the cost of a few plane tickets and rental cars and top-quality kibble—should last us a while here, but when it gives out, I’ve got a backup plan.

I’ve started posting about our life here. You can find me on my YouTube channel. I sent my videos through the dark web to a good friend who posts them for me. I’m even getting the hang of TikTok. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

So far Valerie and I only have 137 subscribers on YouTube, but look how things blew up for Tammy and Kevin. Every influencer has to start somewhere.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © James Barringer

Joyce Maynard is the New York Times bestselling author of eighteen books, including the novels To Die For and Labor Day—both adapted for film—and the memoir At Home in the World. Her most recent novel, Count the Ways, was named an Amazon Best Book of 2021.

More from New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard, a mesmerizing novel that is “rich and complex, beautiful and heartbreaking, just like life” (Ann Hood).

Within four years of meeting, young artists Eleanor and Cam have made a home and are raising three children. Then tragedy strikes: a terrible accident caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness and their marriage falls apart.

Over the ensuing decades, the members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and learn that with great sorrow can come great joy.

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