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job; a woman was coming back from maternity leave and it was a very small office. He gave her the name of Jim’s law firm; the place was big, they hired frequently, she was not to worry. Life had a way of working out, he said. But do you really think so?, she asked, and he said he did.
    The pinkish-tinted buildings of Hartford passed by, and Bob had to slow the car and concentrate. Traffic was picking up. He passed a truck; a truck passed him. And then as he finally drove into Massachusetts, his thoughts, as though waiting, turned to Pam. Pam, his dearly loved ex-wife, whose intelligence and curiosity were matched only by her conviction that she had neither. Pam, whom he had met walking across the campus of the University of Maine more than thirty years ago. She had come from Massachusetts, the only child of older parents who, by the time Bob first greeted them at graduation, appeared worn out by their chaotic daughter (the mother, though, still living, bedridden, in a nursing home not far from this turnpike, no longer knowing who Pam was, or Bob either, should he choose to visit, which he had in the past). Pam, full-figured when she was young, intense, bewildered, always ready to laugh, always tumbling from one enthusiasm to the next. Who could say what anxiety drove her? He recalled her squatting one night to pee between two parked cars in the West Village, drunk and laughing, after they’d moved to New York. Here’s to the women’s movement, a fist in the air. Equal pissing rights! Pam, who could swear like a sailor. His dearly loved Pam.
    And now, seeing a sign for Sturbridge, Bob’s mind went to his grandmother, who used to tell stories of their English ancestors arriving ten generations earlier. Bob, sitting in his child’s chair: “Tell me the part about the Indians.” Oh, there were scalpings, and a little girl kidnapped, taken off to Canada, and her brother, though it took him years in his raggedy clothes, went and rescued her, brought her back to their coastal town. Back then, his grandmother said, women made soap out of ashes. They used daisy root for earaches. One day his grandmother told him how thieves would be made to walk through the town. She said if a man stole a fish he had to walk around town holding the fish, calling out, “I stole this fish and I am sorry!” While the town crier followed, beating a drum.
    Bob’s interest in his ancestors was over with that story. Forced to walk through the town yelling, “I stole this fish and I am sorry!”?
    No. The end.
    And the beginning of New Hampshire, with its state liquor store right off the turnpike, autumnal clouds low in the sky. New Hampshire, with its archaic legislature of hundreds of people, and still that license plate LIVE FREE OR DIE. The traffic was bad; people were getting off at the traffic circle to make their way to the foliage in the White Mountains. He stopped to get coffee and call his sister. “Where are you?” she said. “I’m losing my mind. I can’t believe you’re so late, except I can.”
    “Oy. Susan. I’ll be there soon.”
    The sun was already on its ride down. Back in the car, he left behind Portsmouth, gussied up for years now, the way so many of these coastal towns were; all that urban renewal started in the late seventies when they got their cobblestone streets back, their old houses fixed up, lampposts from the olden days and lots of candle shops. But Bob remembered when Portsmouth was still a tired naval town; and a deep tremor of nostalgia passed through him as he recalled the potholed, unpretentious streets, the large windows of a department store, long since gone, where the displays had seemed to change only from summer to winter, mannequins waving eternally with a handbag hanging from a broken wrist, an eyeless woman standing next to a happy eyeless man, a garden hose at his feet—they did have smiles, those mannequins. All this Bob remembered, for he and Pam had stopped here on their way to Boston in the