On final approach Iowa is a cold earth-toned patchwork quilt coming closer, resolving into individual farms bracketed by gravel roads, then blacktop and the occasional subdivision, and finally the exceedingly modest sprawl of Des Moines at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers. The so-called international airport looks like somebody bulldozed the cornfields on the southwest edge of town and paved them over with two gigantic dragstrips for monster truck racing. The airport’s multistory parking ramps are the highest elevation for miles.

“Can you believe all that green grass?” the omelette-faced businessman next to me wheezes. He’s been rubbing my nerves raw since we left Los Angeles 1,500 miles ago — snotting into a grubby handkerchief, nodding off against my shoulder, making inane smalltalk. “Day before Thanksgiving and the grass ain’t even dormant yet. It’s still looking like September down there. Well, except for all the leaves being gone. Can’t forget that bit, I guess.”

I listen to tendons snap in my fist, clenching and unclenching and clenching again.

The Iowan diaspora is comprised of gigantic jellyfish stuffed into denim and sweatshirts and seed caps. They move toward the baggage claim in a slow avalanche. I’m chasing daylight, darting between their fleshy elbows and hips. My only luggage — a backpack — is slung over my shoulder. Finally I plunge through the glass doors and into the narrow concrete alley between the terminal and its parking ramps, a wind tunnel funneling the prairie breeze into an arctic blast.

An antiquated Ford F-150 nudges the curb in two-toned glory, white and aqua velva. Wendy waves at me through the windshield. A manager of something-or-other at Meredith Publishing, the biggest employer in Des Moines, and my sister is still driving a pickup with 150,000 miles on it. A hand-me-down from Dad. Same way he gave me the keys to the Ford Explorer when I graduated from high school. We’ll drive our vehicles until they shred into rust. You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids.

Wendy is an Aryan pixie with a tragic blond bob and eyes the color of a Beverly Hills swimming pool. She’s wrapped in a pink corduroy jacket and mashing the truck’s pedals with shearling boots. A cigarette is parked in the corner of her mouth. The bright tip jerks in interrogation. “You have a good flight?”

“Good enough to get here,” I say.

“Good.” A typical exchange in our family. Three sentences, three goods.

I’m flashbacking to the driving lessons she gave me in this pickup, back when I was 15 and she was 21. How to drive a stick. It was a boiling summer day with heat waves rising off the gravel road. The windows were rolled down and locusts flitted in and out of the cab like tiny crashlanding helicopters. She was wild and ponytailed and laughing, even when I stalled out for the bazillionth time.

The woman next to me is 33 now. I search her profile for any trace of the bratty artistic girl who drove my parents — all of us, really — to distraction. I remember stealing into her bedroom and reading her secret teenage diaries, full of triple exclamation points, violently underlined words, and boys’ names written in loops that fanned across several lines. This Wendy looks like she never has a triple-exclamation-point thought in her head, never feels anything that deserves underlining.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” I ask, genuinely curious. She’s been AWOL from family gatherings for the last two years on the advice of her therapist.

“Why are you here?” she snaps. Another typical exchange in our family. Answer every question with a question.

“I came to say goodbye to everybody. I’m moving to Mexico next year. Living in Tijuana.”

“For your research?”

“Yeah.”

Wendy nods to herself, as if I’m confirming all her best — or worst — suspicions. Then she stabs out her cigarette butt in the crowded ashtray and fumbles another Virginia Slim to her mouth. “We still live in the same house. You remember the one.” She waves in the direction of East Village, a preservation district of slumping warehouses and decaying apartment buildings and nasty old Victorian-style homes.

By “we” I assume she’s including Glenn, her longtime boyfriend. A misanthropic software geek who looks like he’s made of melted wax. “I’ve never been to your place. Only seen pictures.”

The cigarette tip jerks. “Really?”

“Really.”

That’s it for conversation until we reach the highway, where Wendy can relax and leave the pickup in fifth gear. The drive up I-35 is a lot of flat stubbled cornfields and not much else. The only topographical relief is the occasional overpass leading to half-dead towns of plastic sheeting and tarpaper and septic tanks. Meanwhile she talks my ear off. Bitching about this, bitching about that, chainsmokechainsmokechainsmoke.

Ames is a brief sideways glimmer of grain elevators and water towers poking above a bare-branched forest of oaks. On the north side of town we pass the USDA research lab, a low-slung campus of whitewashed cinderblock buildings with steel roofs. The only place in America that can conclusively test for mad cow disease. On the opposite side of the highway is an office park advertised by a B-24 bomber on a pole.

I stare out the windshield at a landscape ironed flat. The miles crawl by. Wendy is rehashing the litany of parental transgressions against her, imploding with sad grievances. I relive those scenes from my customary place on the periphery of our family. Wendy slouching with sharp elbows at the breakfast table, lips ghoulish with thick white lipstick, saying “Mom, don’t be stupid, everybody in town wears it.” Wendy scandalizing my parents with a crop art panel, the seeds forming a slutty pinup girl modeled after one of Dad’s calendars in the barn. Wendy acting like an idiot on drugs and clutching Mom’s legs moaning “Oh please, please! Make love to me David!” Wendy getting dragged into the farmhouse by her hair after a botched attempt to run away.

Our exit — the last before Minnesota — finally creeps into view. Turn left and you hit 600 of our 800 acres abutting the highway. Normally I’d just sit back and watch the familial fireworks, same as I’ve always done, but I feel obligated to voice the thoughts in Wendy’s head. “You sure you’re up for this?”

“Not really.” She downshifts into motionlessness at the top of the exit ramp. Beyond the stop sign is empty blacktop disappearing toward either horizon.

“You could drop me off and go home to Glenn. I can get a ride back to the airport from Brian.” Brian is our older brother who works the farm with Dad.

Wendy exhales a plume of smoke, considering it. “They’d probably never talk to me again. You think?”

I shrug.

“Goddamnit.” She puts the truck into gear, face souring into resignation.

Growing up each of us coped with Mom and Dad in our way. Brian contorted himself into their dysfunctional ideal of the perfect son, whirling in a stupid codependent orbit that continues to this day. Wendy rebelled with smoking and bad boys and worse behavior, launching into an adult life underwritten by therapy and Prozac. I learned to survive in the minefield of my family and use distance — the emotional kind, as well as the stuff you measure in miles — as my defense.

Shadows are lengthening across the farmstead when we finish bouncing down the long gravel driveway into towering oaks and maples that seem stuck into the ground upside down. Anal. That’s what you think when you look at this place. Everything is immaculate, even the wooden outbuildings that were built when Eisenhower was president. Only the old farmhouse didn’t make it to the 21st century, replaced by a new suburban-style rambler that looks like it was dropped here by a tornado. The freshly-mown lawn around it is growing a bumper crop of lawn schlock — mawkish gnomes, posed plastic deer, narrow decorative things on poles that point into the wind. A dog peels off from the barn and races toward us, barking loud enough to wake the dead.

“You know what?” Wendy says, leaning over to give me an awkward one-armed hug. “I think I’m just gonna drop you off after all. Happy Thanksgiving.”

She peels out in her haste to escape, spattering my pants with gravel. Then the front door opens and fills with the huge silhouette of my brother, and I start to raise a hand in greeting, and 85 pounds of German shepherd hits me like a train.