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windshield, Mother peeled back the curtains with a toothy rip and drove to the nearest beach. She sat on a blanket and practiced her guitar, leaning over her fretting hand and singing in a reedy, off-key voice. Jim and I fished from the pier with our bamboo poles, and while he trailed his line in the water, he talked to me about the virtues of patience. Jim was a man who, if you bought him his favorite candy bar, would thank you and tuck it into his shirt pocket for a while. "Anticipation is the biggest part of pleasure," he used to say. To him, fishing was something of a spiritual exercise.
    The thrill of traveling sustained me for a while, but it was a difficult age to be rootless. I played with other kids for a day or two at a campground or a city park, and then we drove on. After a day on the road, mother tucked me in on my foam pad, warmed from below by the engine's heat. I drifted off to the tick of the cooling engine. Once, when we were parked on a dark residential street, I woke to the knock of a policeman, asking us to move along.
    And move along we did, down the eastern seaboard and through the Carolinas, Georgia, and into Florida, where we stopped in to visit a distant acquaintance, Mrs. Virginia Clark, who lived along the Saint Johns River, south of Jacksonville. We drove down the sandy roads through acres of pine forest to her house, perched on a wide lawn sloping down to the river. Mrs. Clark was nearly one hundred, ran a turpentine plantation, and seemed not to know that slavery had been abolished. She was an avid bird watcher, and had built perches in the forest where we would sit in the evenings, watching herons fly upriver. She still baked in a wood-fired oven, and upon our arrival she threw in an armful of logs and taught my mother the secret of a perfectly flaky pie crust. We spent a few weeks parked under a huge willow in her yard, helping Mrs. Clark check the tree taps.
    When we drove out of Florida and into the Deep South, Jim took on the easy stride of a man returned to his native soil. We stopped at a string of Civil War battle sites—rolling meadows with nothing to hint at the carnage that had taken place there except a few antique cannons and commemorative plaques. These were places Jim's daddy had taken him as a boy, and when he rolled out their names—Chattanooga, Appomattox, Shiloh—and ran his hands over the blackened gunnery, stories started to well up out of him. His father had been a Nabisco cracker salesman, and for every dollar he made he saved fifty cents. "That man taught me the value of a buck," Jim said with a shake of his head.
    When he was sixteen, Jim told me, he had saved up enough from his paper route to buy himself a broken-down Austin Healey, and he took the engine apart on the garage floor, laying each piece out carefully on a tarp, until he had an exploded model of the car. All summer, he worked from the manual, polishing and replacing each part, until he rolled it out into the driveway and the engine turned over and purred.
    That place was full of good memories for him, but he was no longer the clean-cut boy who had taken to those roads in his sports car. We stood out in the South, in a way we hadn't in Boston. On an interstate in Tennessee, we were slowed by a police roadblock. Up ahead, station wagons and family sedans were waved through, but when we came to the front of the line, the patrolman motioned us onto the grassy center divider. Just the sight of a man in uniform made my breath go shallow. I posed daintily on the engine hood, my hands folded and ankles crossed, while a policeman pulled the van apart. Other officers milled around the grass, their radios squawking. They were looking for drugs, of course, but at the time I had no idea what they wanted from us.
    The search seemed to take hours. A patrolman made Jim empty out every jar in our toiletry bag, frustrated that he found no sign of illicit substances. Finally, he seized on a bottle of aspirin with a