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day is extremely significant, although she couldn’t articulate what this significance might be. Or the even higher significance of seeing his actual car, parked somewhere.
    Once he was in his car, driving, when she spotted it. He was turning left in front of her at the corner of Belmont and Sheffield, but she couldn’t bring herself to look straight at him, to see if he was looking at her. She couldn’t bear that much exposure. It’s better when she takes him at a couple of removes. Through music, for instance.
    “I listen for songs we liked.” These still sometimes come up on the radio and raise her hopes, particularly if they come in the same day, or one after the other on the playlist. And now there’s a new musical category—current songs she knows she and Cooper would share, if they were still together, groups she has discovered since him. Wilco. Wilco would definitely be one of their favorites.
    “We keep in touch in a way. I assume all hang-ups are him, and I call him back, late at night, when I’m sure he’ll be out. I get his tape, then hang up before it’s finished.” So she won’t leave a click on his machine, a sound footprint.
    Sometimes she can persuade herself—it takes only a little fiddling with facts—that he is not permanently gone from her, or even moving away. Rather that he is taking an extremely circuitous route back. She doesn’t tell anyone this part, not even Dolores.
    Dolores pulls a smashed pack of Pall Malls out of a jacket pocket, lights one with a Zippo that gives off a metallic aroma as flint meets wheel and a blue flame floods the wick. She inhales deeply, exhales, then picks a speck of tobacco off her magenta-coated lower lip as she emerges from some deep place of reflection.
    “Sometimes missing someone is the best relationship you can have with them. You still have most of the perks—those delicious little rushes of adrenaline, the fantasy highlight reel—but without having to deal with those nasty imperfections, like their ambivalence and petty cruelty, that made life so nerve-wracking when they were still around.”
    Fern recognizes this as tortured logic, but is grateful anyway. She is also momentarily distracted as it occurs to her that Harold doesn’t smoke.
    “And don’t worry about being a nut,” Dolores adds, “about only being able to impersonate sanity. That’s really the best anyone can hope for.” She clenches the smoldering cigarette between her lips, and hauls herself out of the chair while dangling her shoes from two fingers. “I’m going to get out of this girdle and soak in a tub. Those girls are
murderous
at the card table. I feel like I’ve put in a shift in the mines.”
    The phone rings as though it has been politely holding off.
    “Take your time,” Dolores says, waving goodbye with a wiggle of fingers behind her as she heads for her bath.

Road Trip
    NORA AND HAROLD were sharing the back seat, but not happily. She licked a finger and drew an invisible line down the middle of the white leather upholstery of the Pontiac Bonneville.
    “Cross this and I’ll be forced to kill you,” she told him. He was seven and bored in the car and whined to persuade their mother, Lynette, to stop at the Giant Glass Beehive or the Mystery Mansion, or whined to get Nora to play License Plate Bingo. Through Pennsylvania and Maryland, before Lynette brought the milk bottle aboard, he had whined to stop at gas station rest rooms about every half hour. Now he peed in the bottle, then gave it to Lynette, who held it straight-armed out the window as she zoomed down the interstate and various shortcut, two-lane highways, letting loose a golden stream that made Nora slide below window level in embarrassment.
    Plus, not all of Harold’s pee made it into the bottle; his aim was wobbly and a squirt often dribbled onto the floor or seat, or worse, onto Nora, which was one of the reasons she had drawn her line.
    It was midafternoon in the middle of February deep