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not sorry.”
    “Hannah!” I said, at the same time that Pete said, “I can see him, Hannah.”
    It was thickly quiet for a moment, and then Pete said, “I guess if you can’t remember to respect my rules, I can’t remember to give you money for concert tickets.”
    “Dad, I’m sorry, okay? It just slipped out. It’s not—I don’t know why you get so bent out of shape about this! It’s just an expression everybody uses. I don’t get it, why you’re always so—” He stopped, exasperated. Stared out the window. “It’s
weird,
” he said, under his breath.
    Pete put the blinker on and moved to the right lane to pull off into a rest stop.
    “Uh-oh,” Hannah said. “You’re gonna get it.”
    “Pete,” I said, “don’t be so—”
    But he stopped the car, cut the engine, stared at me in a direct bid for support, and turned around to look at his children. “There are certain things in your life that will become very important to you,” he said. “You might not be able to explain to anyone else why they’re important. But you will expect the people who love you, the people who are your family, to respect those things. If any of you need to swear, do it somewhere else. It
bothers
me.”
    “But—don’t get mad, Dad, okay?” Anthony said. “I just wish you’d tell me
why
you think it’s so bad.”
    Pete faced forward and rubbed the back of his neck. “Just . . . don’t. Okay? I tell you again, don’t do it around me.
Period.
” He started the engine.
    “Do you want me to drive for a while?” I asked.
    “I’m fine.”
    “I’ll drive,” Hannah said, and I was relieved to see Pete’s small smile. I too once asked Pete why it was so terribly offensive to him when people swore. It had been many years ago; we’d only been dating a few months. We were out walking in a park, and I’d asked more or less the same question, and Pete had stopped to examine a leaf on a tree. He’d been turned away from me when he’d said, “It’s just . . . it’s a need I have. It doesn’t matter why.”
    “Okay,” I’d said. And I thought maybe I’d have to stop seeing him—his answer had made me really uncomfortable, and I had a habit of swearing a lot. But there’d been nothing else so tightly wound about him. Anyway, by then it was too late: I loved the planes of his face, his black hair and blue eyes, his elegant table manners, his deep voice, his love of animals and children, his otherwise easygoing manner. I loved
him.
I would forgive him this and hope he would forgive my own irritating mannerisms.
    “They have sixty-five rides,” Anthony said, reading again from the newspaper.
    Silence.
    “In 1965,” he said, “Princess Kay of the Milky Way wore a formal gown made of butter wrappers.”
    “All
right,
” Hannah said. “Just be quiet, now, I’m trying to read.”
    “Okay, but just one more thing. You know what else?”
    She sighed. “What?”
    “You know how they make those sculptures out of butter? The head of Princess Kay of the Milky Way?”
    “Yeah. And her court.”
    “Right. Well, most of them freeze their heads. But this one princess? She melted hers down for a corn feed.”
    “Let me see,” Hannah said.
    I leaned my head against the window and tried to doze while peace reigned, but I couldn’t. First I imagined that practical Princess Kay dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt and loafers, hair in a ponytail, standing over a Dutch oven in some farm kitchen, watching her likeness melt down into nothing. Then I thought of my parents, waiting for us. My mother would be wearing some new outfit she’d purchased for the occasion, and she’d meet us at the door, chatting a mile a minute. My father would be puttering in the basement, and when we arrived he would solemnly come into the kitchen to offer his muted greeting. Standing in that familiar place, I believed I would feel the usual odd mix of sensations. Some of it would have to do with the inescapable nostalgia and