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You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up to see you out. The old knee’s been acting up.”
    “Of course,” Connie said, rising. “All of this is just between the two of us, right, doctor?”
    “Yes. Completely confidential. Always.”
    Connie worried—not that people would learn the details of Gene’s strange behavior, which had been her worry before the meeting, but that they would say that Connie was trying to have him committed.
    “Show me the way, Lord,” Connie whispered as she drove home. “Send someone to show me the way.”
    And God had answered her prayer. She had had her spiritual awakening. That had been over a year ago.
    G ENE BEHAVED HIMSELF through the rest of the service, so in the car after church Connie allowed him to punch the button on the dashboard that realigned the mileage meter to a row of zeros (as he insisted he must before any trip), and they headed to Boise. Eula sat in a slight depression in the countryside, a basin in which, this time of year, the molasses-smelling smoke from the sugar factory pooled with worse odors from the stockyards along the railroad tracks. To drive out of town felt a little like elbowing yourself up out of a bed that was cozy, yes, but which smelled of a night’s worth of sweat and digestion. Connie mounted that first gentle ridge where twin wheat fields rose slightly, then lay flat on either side of the highway like the yellowed pages of an open book. The wildfires had been extinguished weeks ago. The haze had cleared, and now blue sky whitened where it met the earth in a crisp line that was interrupted by a ship-like butte, then again ran perfectly flat until turning jagged with the distant mountains ahead, beyond Boise. In the rearview mirror Connie could see beyond Eula’s jumble of trees and rooftops and billboards advertising cheap accommodations to the pale, treeless folds of the Owyhee Mountains.
    Twenty minutes of driving north or south would have taken Connie through the irrigated belt that lined the Snake River, up to where the green ceased and the scrub took over. The earth seemed to lose its meat here and become dry, as if a vast rock—a skull—rose underground, leaving only the thinnest skin of soil. That was a lonely territory of jackrabbits and coyotes and dying ranch towns populated by leathery-skinned cowboys. Driving to Boise, however, she stayed parallel to the river, so the comforting patchwork landscape littered with houses and silos continued for forty-five minutes, until it disappeared behind walls meant to shield the subdivisions from the highway’s noise. Then the city opened before her with its two tall buildings like sentries guarding the gleaming white egg of the capitol dome.
    Connie drove downtown and parked in front of the magazine store, which was actually a smoke shop. It seemed as old as Boise itself; the same neon cigarette had glowed in the window on the Sundays thirty years earlier when Connie would come with her father to buy tobacco and papers. He quit on doctor’s orders years ago, but the fingertips of his right hand were still yellow. He now kept a toothpick at the corner of his mouth, as if holding the spot for his beloved cigarette, should it ever choose to return.
    Connie and Gene entered the store, which smelled like her father. Connie read a gardening magazine while Gene, on his knees, rifled through pages of newsprint. After twenty minutes, he came and stood before her, holding a great pile: three big Sunday newspapers and two glossy science magazines. “Now, Gene, don’t get used to this,” Connie said as they walked to the front. “It’s even more than last week. We can’t afford it.” But Connie was secretly glad to do something so normal for her son. She would have preferred magazines about cars or airplanes—these science magazines, she imagined, might include propaganda like evolution and the “Big Bang”—but still.
    Connie put the pile on the counter, caught a glimpse of pornography behind