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waste. My parents never took well to passive aggression. They gave more consideration to junk mail.
    â€œYes,” my father snapped, “you were wrong. At least you got something right. And, by the way, I actually do understand.
I understand you want your girlfriend to stay overnight, and I also understand that she’s not going to stay.”
    â€œWho’s staying over?” my mother asked as she stepped into the kitchen, tying her robe around her small, intimidating frame.
    Over the years, Ma has worked as a psychiatric nurse, a cellblock matron at the local cop shop, and a 911 dispatcher. Her cheerful character often suited her cheerless jobs. She is observant, decisive, fair, and jackboot tough. Together, all five feet and change of my mother has the presence of a razor. It cut away any hope that Karen would be spending the night. The story about lost keys was true, but, admittedly, I’d marked it for a good pretense to have Karen over. Ma would see that, no doubt. I turned back to my father for refuge.
    â€œWell, what do you think I should do, then?” I asked. I hoped he would be stumped for an answer.
    â€œLet’s see. Hmm, I know. You take the keys, you drive her home, and you take a screwdriver to open a window.”
    â€œFine,” I conceded.
    â€œHave you been drinking?”
    My parents knew we’d been at a party. I knew something different. A dozen of us had actually been hard at work helping our friend Andrew harvest any magic mushrooms we could find around his family farm. I hadn’t eaten any this time, but Karen, I imagined, was having a wonderful visit with our front porch.
    â€œNo,” I lied. “I didn’t drink anything.” Three beers didn’t seem to be enough to get in even more trouble over.
    Karen’s bedroom window was unlocked, after all. Getting
her inside didn’t prove to be much of a problem. Only the mushrooms got in the way.
    â€œWindows are cool,” she informed me.
    I held her up by the feet and tried to help her through. Karen seemed to forget the purpose of standing there, opting to gawk instead of move.
    â€œI’m, like, all about windows. I’m so pro-windows,” she said, then climbed in for the night.
    I couldn’t linger. I knew my father would be waiting up for me, so I drove straight home, careful to stop at the end of Karen’s street when the sign told me to.
    It was early September and unseasonably cold. Fog crowded its way into the lower stretches of the route home and made it hard for me to see my turn. I could make out the streetlights, but the fog smeared the lights across my eyes, wiping out anything the brightness intended to catch. A car approached. Its headlights burst in the fog and made an obstacle I couldn’t see around. I slowed down and dropped the car into first gear, barely inching along the road, and listened to the other car speed past. How could it do that? None approached from behind, and none approached in front. I was alone and creeping in the dark, the closest thing I could manage to feeling my way home with my functional four senses trapped inside the car. I wanted to turn the headlights sideways to light the periphery. The best I could do was guess where to turn.
    When I judged I was close, even in the middle of the intersection, I cranked to the right. It wasn’t the road, though, and it wasn’t a grassy patch. This time I felt the car lean and
slowly descend into a ditch. Calm, as if used to this sort of thing, I braked and turned off the car. I hadn’t crashed. I had, essentially, parked Dad’s car on the bank.
    When I tried to back out, the tires were helpless against the wet grass. Instead of retreating, I slid a bit further down. My father had just installed a cell phone in his car that week, the newest thing going. I tried it out for the first time. The receiver was so large it felt like a VHS tape against my ear. At home the phone rang, and I