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seemingly holding the house up, the neighborhood is a nice, quiet little lower-middle-class place with a comfortable feeling of familieswho have lived their whole lives there. We live in a ritzier part of town that feels sterile to me. I know our next-door neighbors, but I don’t know any of the people up and down the street. Elaine’s neighborhood is like a little community.
    The leaves on the trees are nearly gone and temperatures have been getting down around freezing at night, so smoke curled out of almost every chimney and it felt like there was probably a lot in that little neighborhood to be thankful for. It seemed as if Elaine and I bumped gently together a few times more than random chance would have it, but it’s hard to say. I was pretty aware. We talked about swimming and what it would take for me to do well at State—how much I wanted it—and a little about the Nazi newspapers that Lion burned, and about how strange it seems to me sometimes that I’m so far away from my parents and that my brother is like a distant uncle to me unless we have a reason to purposely make a connection. Sometimes I wonder who I am, because it seems like I don’t have a solid anchor in my family. Elaine said she thought when we don’t have a family to hook up to, we hook up to the next-best thing—our friends. “Look at Lion,” she said. “He doesn’t have any family at all, but he knows who he is, mostly in relationship to all of us. You probably do that some too.”
    â€œI know I do,” I said. “And, all in all, it’s probably more healthy than what my real family has to offer. But I keep getting pulled back to them. I want my brother to be different. I want his life to mean something. And, Christ, just because my parents are old doesn’t mean they have to give up on everything. Sometimes I think they’re just breathing our air. My family doesn’t have any personality. ”
    She smiled. “They aren’t exactly the Beaver Cleavers, but they could be worse. You could have my dad. Look at the things he makes important.” She shrugged. “You have to go with what you get.”
    We got back to the house and Elaine made me a monstrous turkey sandwich and wrapped a piece of pumpkin pie for later. Her mom invited me back for the meal of my choice over the weekend, but I politely declined, telling her I might need it more later; that I’d take a rain check. It was after midnight when I turned onto the arterial leading up onto the South Hill, where I live. It was one of those times when I felt closer to getting a better look at things. Talking with Elaine like that, with no judgment from her or anything, seemed to bring my feelings more to the surface so I could look at them. I love times like that; you don’t get many of them. I passed the turnoff to our house and continued on upto 57th and out to the Palouse Highway, which heads east toward the Idaho panhandle. There wasn’t another car on the road and the white line shooting under my car had an almost hypnotic effect. Away from town, the stars became bright enough to outline the mountains around me, and I turned off the dash lights and leaned over the steering wheel to look up at the Milky Way. Out there alone, it was a lot easier to see why Elaine gets such a charge out of her Astronomy class. I must have driven for an hour and a half in my little Duster cocoon, thinking; trying to come up with answers for the things I think are important. I came up with a lot more questions than answers: like, what am I going to do about Devnee, my girlfriend? She’s a nice girl—a really pretty girl—who I’ve been going with about two months longer than I should have, obviously, because I don’t feel anything for her anymore; but I can’t say that to her. I just can’t do it—no matter how much I want to end it and no matter how much I have to fake it when