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place for the night.
    "We're at your mom's. We're missing you," Kate told me in her quiet voice. "Is everything going okay out there?"
    "Don't worry, Kate. I'm being careful. Everything's going just fine."
    Kate had worked at Macy's in Sacramento when she'd left the mountains after high school. She'd lived in an apartment downtown, near the nightlife; Rita had been her roommate. Now Rita lived on the south side of town, in a simple duplex in an urban neighborhood with her two young boys. She was attractive like Kate, still in retail. She gave me her couch while she put the boys to bed. When she came back downstairs, she asked if I wanted to smoke.
    I tapped the bottle of Alleycat I'd brought in with me. "Haven't touched it since college. Never liked it. Now I know enough to stick to beer."
    "Drinkers and smokers," she said and laughed. "Isn't that the way?"
    Rita sat in an armchair, looking tired from work, rolling a joint on a little wooden cutting board on her lap and telling me about Kate in the old days. "So you married Kate Sisson? Isn't she so pretty? Man, all we ever did back then was spend our money. God, did we have some fun."
    It was quiet, and I felt safe. The fear I'd had on the road was gone. I liked Rita, would have hit on her in my past life. Should I tell her about the weed? Should I not? What would she think of me if I did? At last I said, "Rita? Can you keep a big secret?"
    She knitted her brow, looked at me suspiciously. Then she said softly, "Sure."
    I hurried out to the parking lot, didn't want to leave the weed out there all night anyway—it was worth more than the car. I grabbed the package, brought it back to the house, unwrapped it on her kitchen table. The place was silent, the children asleep. Rita took one look at all that weed, covered her mouth with her hands, and said, "Man, are you totally insane?"
    She immediately called her brother Henry, who came over with a friend, Jerome. Jerome had a digital scale. He zeroed a small Tupperware bowl on it, began fishing out big buds. Rita grabbed one, smelled it, passed it to Henry. They nodded their heads. I got nervous among those strangers, and said to Jerome, "How much are you taking out?"
    "An ounce."
    I mulled my lip. "How much does an ounce weigh?"
    He shot me a confused look. He said, "Dude, do you even know what the fuck you're doing?"
    They took turns running out to an ATM, bought three ounces, $1,200 cash. Not six hours into it, I'd already made half our money back. Rita wanted the biggest buds for herself, so did Henry and Jerome. When they passed around a bowl of it, Henry closed his eyes and said, "Chronic."
    Henry was a third-grade teacher, Jerome a teller at a bank. Both of them looked like their jobs. Henry said to me, "If you stay over another day, you'll get all of this sold, most of it at four hundred an O.Z. Nobody wants to go through a dealer. It would be between you and our friends."
    Could I stay? Hustle back up to Dunsmuir, grab another pound from Darren? But Kate and the baby were waiting for me in Florida. Jerome said, "Dude, this shit you got is the real kush. Wherever you take it, they're gonna be blown away. Call us anytime you're passing through. We'll always score a few ounces off you."
    Later, lying awake on the couch, I thought about the evening, how excited they'd been. I'd had no idea about that part of it. Hadn't that made me feel good, like I hadn't in a while? Hadn't that been why I'd done it? The roll of money was thick in my pocket. I knew Mason would understand why I'd started selling it.
    Just before Rita had gone up to bed, I'd said to her, "Am I taking this money from your kids?"
    She'd grinned at me and said, "I still have a job, don't worry about me. And don't you have a kid now, too?"
    I left in the morning before they got up. The yellow dawn was breaking over the dirty city and there were already cars on the road.
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    I stopped that evening in Needles, California, in the Mojave. Kate and I had done