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then swatted me—but I loved her in spite of it. Partly even because of it. I loved her when she hit me as much as when she kissed me. Do you understand that? Me either. And that’s all right. I don’t think you can sum up lives or explain families, and we were a family, she and I, the smallest family there is, a tight little family of two, a shared secret. If you had asked, I would have said I’d do anything for her. And now that was exactly what I was being asked to do. I was being asked to die for her, to die in her place, even though she had lived half her life, probably a lot more. I had hardly begun mine.
    â€œWhat say, Al?” George Staub asked. “Time’s wasting.”
    â€œI can’t decide something like that,” I said hoarsely. The moon sailed above the road, swift and brilliant. “It’s not fair to ask me.”
    â€œI know, and believe me, that’s what they all say.” Then he lowered his voice. “But I gotta tell you something—if you don’t decide by the time we get back to the first house lights, I’ll have to take you both.” He frowned, then brightened again, as if remembering there was good news as well as bad. “You could ride together in the backseat if I took you both, talk over old times, there’s that.”
    â€œRide to where?”
    He didn’t reply. Perhaps he didn’t know.
    The trees blurred by like black ink. The headlights rushed and the road rolled. I was twenty-one. I wasn’t a virgin but I’d only been with a girl once and I’d been drunk and couldn’t remember much of what it had been like. There were a thousand places I wanted to go—Los Angeles, Tahiti, maybe Luchenbach, Texas—and a thousand things I wanted to do. My mother was forty-eight and that was old, goddammit. Mrs. McCurdy wouldn’t say so but Mrs. McCurdy was old herself. My mother had done right by me, worked all those long hours and taken care of me, but had I chosen her life for her? Asked to be born and then demanded that she live for me? She was forty-eight. I was twenty-one. I had, as they said, my whole life before me. But was that the way you judged? How did you decide a thing like this? How could you decide a thing like this?
    The woods bolting by. The moon looking down like a bright and deadly eye.
    â€œBetter hurry up, man,” George Staub said. “We’re running out of wilderness.”
    I opened my mouth and tried to speak. Nothing came out but an arid sigh.
    â€œHere, got just the thing,” he said, and reached behind him. His shirt pulled up again and I got another look (I could have done without it) at the stitched black line on his belly. Were there still gutsbehind that line or just packing soaked in chemicals? When he brought his hand back, he had a can of beer in it—one of those he’d bought at the state line store on his last ride, presumably.
    â€œI know how it is,” he said. “Stress gets you dry in the mouth. Here.”
    He handed me the can. I took it, pulled the ringtab, and drank deeply. The taste of the beer going down was cold and bitter. I’ve never had a beer since. I just can’t drink it. I can barely stand to watch the commercials on TV.
    Ahead of us in the blowing dark, a yellow light glimmered.
    â€œHurry up, Al—got to speed it up. That’s the first house, right up at the top of this hill. If you got something to say to me, you better say it now.”
    The light disappeared, then came back again, only now it was several lights. They were windows. Behind them were ordinary people doing ordinary things—watching TV, feeding the cat, maybe beating off in the bathroom.
    I thought of us standing in line at Thrill Village, Jean and Alan Parker, a big woman with dark patches of sweat around the armpits of her sundress and her little boy. She hadn’t wanted to stand in that line, Staub was right about