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old sewing machine, I had already made some flare-orange bike panniers from a mail-order kit. And look, I said, we cut up our map and glued it to a big piece of cloth, so it can be folded and refolded without ripping.
    They glanced at the huge map, with our route inked in black, and said nothing. To my prairie-raised parents, South America was unimaginable, a lawless continent of anacondas and piranhas. (We did in fact encounter a very, very, very long anaconda, the diameter of a telephone pole, sunbathing on a culvert under a bridge. Parents are not always wrong.)
    But I wasn’t ready to think about my mother as being frail or needing my care. And was it my fault that all three of her kids were not thriving in the ways she had hoped they would? As for being in shape for pedalling through the Andes, that didn’t concern me. I had already cut down to one cigarette a day.
    â€œI better go or I’ll miss my train,” I said, as I stood at the front door with my backpack on, trying not to bump into the door chimes. My mother didn’t get up. I leaned over to kiss her, but she seemed to want the moment to pass quickly, so I let it.
    â€œI’ll stay in touch and phone at Christmas,” I promised. “I can always fly back, you know.” She swung back to the window. My father jingled the change in his trouser pocket, a sign that he was agitated. He clamped a hand on my shoulder.
    â€œYou be careful down there,” he said gruffly, full of love.
    Back in Santa Margarita, I write postcards while Bob and Kathy water the pots of geraniums in the courtyard, bowing again and again, like monks. The little swimming pool has been filled but it’s still too cold to use. I’m considering a quick trip into Alte to buy a bottle of wine and to use the phone kiosk there. It’s red, and right in the middle of the main square, like a religious shrine. My outings on this holiday, I realize, are mostly communication-related.
    But I know Brian won’t be waiting to hear from me. He’s probably relieved to have his hand-wringing wife off the grid for a while. At a certain point anxiety becomes more about the anxious one than the object of worry. I know it’s only normal for a mother to fret about a young son on the road but I suspect that Casey’s going away has also stirred ancient fears in me, of loss and desertion. I can’t stop imagining all the terrible things that could happen to the people I love. But then my father was a catastrophizer too.
    I remember sitting in the sofa-sized back seat of the Buick when I was young, with my father at the wheel, his big square hands at the ten and two o’clock position. He was driving up the main street, under a yellow traffic light suspended over the road. It swayed slightly in the wind.
    â€œThat sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed,”my father muttered. “It could come crashing down and kill someone.” He loved the words “bashing” and “crashing” and used them often,with relish. The weather worried him too,which was not surprising for someone who grew up under unpredictable prairie skies and had lost his own father to TB at the age of 12. He’d stand at the window, twitching the protective curtains (two layers, nylon sheers under heavy pleated drapes, on tracks).
    â€œLook at those clouds,” he’d say darkly. “Boy, we’re in for it now.”
    My father was both a worrier and an engineer, which might explain why he became such a consummate fixer of things, a saver, and a planner. What a provider—quaint word!—he was. He would meticulously chart the vicissitudes of the stock market on hand-drawn coloured graphs, copy, laminate, and bind the pages, then present them to his three children. We would thank him and stick the envelopes in a bottom drawer. Money didn’t interest us.
    I walk down into the village, where there isn’t a soul in the streets. Is it Sunday? What