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Then the back door opened and he came down the driveway, his lunch bucket banging against one leg.
    He got in, slammed the door, and said, “Drive on, Jeeves.” This was one of Arnie’s standard witticisms when he was in a good humor.
    I drove on, looked at him cautiously, almost decided to say something, and then decided I better wait for him to start . . . if he had anything to say at all.
    For a long time it seemed that he didn’t. We drove most of the way to work with no conversation between us at all, nothing but the sound of WMDY, the local rock-and-soul station. Arnie beat time absently against his leg.
    At last he said, “I’m sorry you had to be in on that last night, man.”
    â€œThat’s okay, Arnie.”
    â€œHas it ever occurred to you,” he said abruptly, “that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œTell you what I think,” he said. We were coming up on the construction site now; the Carson Brothers trailer was only two rises over. The traffic this early was light and somnolent. The sky was a sweet peach color. “I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.”
    â€œThat sounds very rational,” I said. “Mine are always trying to kill me. Last night it was my mother sneaking in with a pillow and putting it over my face. Night before it was Dad chasing my sister and me around with a screwdriver.” I was kidding, but I wondered what Michael and Regina might think if they could hear this rap.
    â€œI know it sounds a little crazy at first,” Arnie said, unperturbed, “but there are lots of things that sound nuts until you really consider them. Penis envy. Oedipal conflicts. The Shroud of Turin.”
    â€œSounds like horseshit to me,” I said. “You had a fight with your folks, that’s all.”
    â€œI really believe it, though,” Arnie said pensively. “Not that they know what they’re doing; I don’t believe that at all. And do you know why?”
    â€œDo tell,” I said.
    â€œBecause as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you’re going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.”
    â€œYou know what, Arnie?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI think that’s fucking gruesome,” I said, and we both burst out laughing.
    â€œI don’t mean it that way,” he said.
    We pulled into the parking lot and I turned off the engine. We sat there for a moment or two.
    â€œI told them I’d opt out of the college courses,” he said. “Told them I’d sign up for V.T. right across the board.”
    V.T. was vocational training. The same sort of thing the reform-school boys get, except of course they don’t go home at night. They have what you might call a compulsory live-in program.
    â€œArnie,” I began, unsure of just how to go on. The way this thing had blown up out of nothing still freaked me out. “Arnie, you’re still a minor. They have to sign your program—”
    â€œSure, of course,” Arnie said. He smiled at me humorlessly, and in that cold dawn light he looked at once older and much, much younger . . . like a cynical baby, somehow. “They have the power to cancel my entire program for another year, if they want to, and substitute their own. They could sign me up for Home Ec and World of Fashion, if they wanted to. The law says they can do it. But no law says they can make me pass what they pick.”
    That brought it home to me—the distance he had gone, I mean. How could that old clunker of a car have come to mean so much to him so damned fast? In the following days that question kept coming at me in different ways, the way I’ve always imagined a fresh grief would. When Arnie told Michael and Regina he meant to have it, he sure hadn’t been kidding. He