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“Come off it, Walter. You sound pathetic.” Then theydisgorged onto broken tarmac and drove deserted roads to the cabin at Cattle Point, where Walter installed his soured teen lover, put a wad of cash in her hand, and started dinner—macaroni and cheese in a box.
    Diane wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk, either. The rain was louder on the roof because of her silence. She went in the bedroom, shut the door, and ignored him. Walter passed the night on the couch, awake with his clothes on, while she snored on the other side of the wall in a way that, despite everything, was moving and endearing. Somebody that young and beautiful could snore and it was charming instead of obnoxious.
    In the morning, before she woke, he sped into Friday Harbor. After scouring want ads in his idling Lincoln, he made a call from a booth and, following a cursory test drive, bought a seventy-five-dollar beater. It had buckled seat springs and smelled of mildew, but, leaving his own car behind, Walter drove it back to Cattle Point and, with false enthusiasm, urged Diane to learn to drive. “Come on,” he said. “This will be fun.” As if they could be jolly about an automobile, as if they were father and daughter. Diane got behind the wheel and immediately demonstrated her driving know-how. “None of your business,” she answered Walter when he asked her where and when she’d learned.
    They went back for the Lincoln, then caravanned to a gas station, where Walter filled both tanks. He bought a quart of ice cream, a deck of cards, a book of crossword puzzles, and four bags of groceries. All of this went into Diane’s topped-off beater. No, she said, she didn’t need him to lead her back, because she knew “the way to jail.” What she did need was twice the cash he’d doled out earlier. Walter forked it over. He stressed that she should enjoy herself, use the car when she needed to, and wait things out. “Brilliant,” said Diane. “That’s just brilliant.”
    One more time, Walter apologized, as if repeating himself would make things better instead of worse. “Look,” he said, “I take full responsibility for my part in this. I have a duty here, I know that, and I plan to see that duty through, no matter what.”
    “Go home,” she answered. “And lay off the subject of what a good citizen you are, all right?”
    On the ferry, his tail between his legs, Walter rubbed his receding hairline and stewed behind his steering wheel. On the mainland, he battled homeward in rain so harsh he worried that an accident, if it happened, would be his undoing. How was it, Lydia would want to know,that he’d had an accident
north
of home when the airport was
south
of it—the airport he’d supposedly made use of for his supposed trip to Houston? “Right,” thought Walter, “I’ve been in Houston,” and he stopped at Northgate Shopping Center to look for gifts that would seem like Texan gifts.
    That night, sleepless, with Lydia beside him in a cotton nightgown and high-waisted panties, he lay in bed worrying about ways his plan could fall apart. What scared him the most was Diane’s clear ire and her potential for irrational behavior. She might go to a pay phone in Friday Harbor and call him at home, for instance, even though he’d asked her not to. This worried him so much that, in the morning, when the phone rang, he answered in a panic, sure it was Diane, but it wasn’t Diane, and all weekend it wasn’t Diane, and even though he still worried about a phone call incessantly, by Monday he’d succeeded in incorporating this worry into the larger, more generalized, apocalyptic worry he felt about the whole affair. How much more could he take?
    On Monday, Walter contacted an obstetrician in Anacortes and an adoption agency in Bellingham about “a delicate situation involving our au pair.” On Wednesday, he took a day off from work and ran up to San Juan Island with flowers, doughnuts, magazines, and a used television set. As it turned