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that road eight months before, and as I retraced our journey, I thought about all the things that had happened in the meantime. The warmth of the summer and catching my first trout, the tall trees around us in their evergreen coats. The baby kicking in my wife's belly, our quiet evenings together. Splitting wood in the falling snow, the firelight in the cabin. The awful drive down the mountain, the birth of my little girl.
    When I called Kate from a truck stop outside Los Banos, the girls three time zones ahead, Kate told me she and the baby had gone to the beach already, she was feeling good about things today. When I told her I'd showed the weed to Rita, she said, "Why would you have risked that, James?" I explained the money I'd made, and Kate said she was proud of me for selling some of it myself, that though I shouldn't show it to anyone again, it was okay this once because Rita was trustworthy. Kate said, "Did she tell you at all how we used to be?"
    "She said you guys had a lot of fun back then."
    "Did she say anything embarrassing about me?"
    "She said you liked to spend your money."
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    I crossed the desert, mountains, plains, quickly learned the art of driving flawlessly so as not to be pulled over. Every moment in the car was a moment when something could go wrong, every second behind the wheel was real work. Speeders stood out from the crowd as targets for the police, of course, but so did people driving too slow. Staying in the middle of a pack of cars was the best thing to do, no matter what the speed. I constantly scanned the road ahead for cops parked in speed traps in the brush, obsessively checked the rearview for cruisers coming up on my tail. Every time I changed lanes, I signaled; at no time did I ever tailgate. I did my utmost to drive perfectly every inch of the way, never give a cop a reason to hurry up behind me, flip on his lights and siren.
    I didn't listen to the radio, didn't talk on the phone. As I burned down a tank of gas, four or five hours without stopping, Kate worried about me all of that long silence. "How am I supposed to know you're okay out there?" she'd ask when I'd finally call from a gas station.
    "No news is good news. I'll text you if I get pulled over."
    In northern Arizona, the highway was bustling with cops. In Albuquerque, my left taillight went out, and I stashed the weed under the bed in my motel room, bought a replacement bulb from Pep Boys, read the car's manual, fixed it myself. I took the I-40 all the way to Amarillo, then dropped down through the heart of Texas. I drove each day from dawn to dusk, peeing at rest stops and eating cheeseburgers. The car still had Texas plates on it because Kate and I hadn't wanted to pay the exorbitant California registration fee. Once I left the Golden State, I saw that Texas plates were common everywhere.
    I saw so many things out there I hadn't noticed before. Some cars simply looked like they were hauling drugs, the windows tinted, the hubcaps spinning, the plates from out of state—they might as well have had neon signs in their back windows flashing "Pull Me Over! Pull Me Over!" I'd always been a standalone speeder, zooming down the road all by myself and exposed, but now I didn't leave the safety of other cars, which mostly drove the limit—I'd had no idea most people didn't speed. There were so many different types of vehicles on the road, any one of them could be carrying weed. When I'd come alongside an old guy in an RV and he'd nod his head at me, I'd think, He could have two hundred pounds in there.
    Every fifty miles or so, somebody really was pulled over. Sometimes the driver would be sitting on the side of the road while the cop looked through the trunk, most times not. They weren't the kinds of scenes you'd notice unless you were thinking about them, blurred images passing at seventy miles an hour. But all along that drive I was hyperalert, taking note of everything I saw.
    On the third day, south of Lubbock, the