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sure you inspect it first. Look for red, firm meat.”
    “I can’t do this over the phone?”
    “You have to see it. Make sure it’s good fish.”
    “By the weekend it won’t be fresh, though.”
    “It’s smoked. It’ll keep. Don’t flake out on me this time. Don’t pull another Santa Fe.”
    She wounds me. Santa Fe was a fluke, and not my fault. Our mother had visited a gallery there during one of her winter Winnebago runs with her current husband, the Lovely Man. (So called because he’s small, he hardly speaks, and he has no discernible personality.) She fell in love with a Zuni bracelet there and described it to Julie, who mentioned it to Kara, who ordered me, on my next trip to New Mexico, to buy the thing as a gift from the whole family on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. I did my best, but due to a buildup of errors in the description, the piece my mother ultimately received was Hopi, ill-fitting, overpriced, and, as my mother told the Lovely Man (who then told Kara, proving he’s not so lovely), “positively god-awful.”
    “Unfair,” I say.
    “Well, this is your chance to redeem yourself.”
    “Unfair.”
    “There’s one other thing,” says Kara. “Tammy Jansen, Julie’s maid of honor. She’s in St. Louis now. Her car’s in the shop, so she’s going to have to fly up, except that she can’t afford the fare they quoted. Twelve hundred dollars round-trip! I hate these airlines.”
    “Fine,” I say. “We’ll both chip in six hundred.”
    “I already offered. When she tried to book, though, they told her they’d run out of seats.”
    I know what’s coming. Take a hard line, I tell myself. Don’t budge. You have a policy, you’ve stated it often, and now you will have to repeat it for the record.
    “Maybe you could cash in some miles,” says Kara.
    I love my sister. Unfortunately, she’s ignorant. She doesn’t fly on any regular basis, so she doesn’t know what I’ve been up against out here. For years, Great West has been my boss, my sergeant, dictating where I went and if I went, deciding what I ate and if I ate. My mileage is my one chance to strike back, to snatch satisfaction from humiliation.
    “We’ll need to find another way,” I say.
    “This is ridiculous, Ryan. This is sad.”
    “How’s Mom? Have you talked to her?”
    “Call her this year, will you? She thinks you’ve turned into butter, disappeared.”
    “Those two move around more than I do.”
    “Be honest: Were you in Salt Lake last week?” she says. “Maybe you have a girl here. I’m concerned. What if you’re leading some shameful double life? What if you’re in trouble and need help? You’re awfully isolated, the way you live.”
    “Isolated? I’m surrounded,” I say.
    “We’re getting off track now.”
    “You started this whole subject.”
    “Let’s leave it that Kara’s worried. Now let’s rewind. Tammy needs to get here from Missouri.”
    Solving the problem isn’t my sister’s goal. She rejects any number of reasonable proposals—an Amtrak ticket (“Tammy throws up on trains”); a rental car (“The long drive will exhaust her”)—and insists on testing my resistance to giving something away that cost me nothing—or so it seems to her. She calls my mileage rule “this stupid glitch of yours,” and though I’m screaming inside, I don’t explain myself. The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible. Sally will not wear synthetics. That’s who she is. Billy won’t touch eggs. That’s Billy for you. To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
    The conversation ends here: “My miles are mine.”
    I put down the phone. I have a plane to catch.
three

    i know of no pleasure more reliable than consuming a great American brand against the backdrop featured in its advertising. Driving a Ford pickup