I did though. I almost fell over when you asked me.” She puts her chin down as though deep in serious thought and makes a little clucking sound with her tongue. “If you’d asked me to go to Washington, D.C., or Chicago, Illinois, or Timbuktu, I probably would’ve said no. But when I was a little girl my Daddy used to always say, ‘Detroit makes, the world takes.’ And that was just such a puzzle to me I figured I had to see it. It seemed so unusual, you know, to me. And romantic. He’d gone up there to work after the Korean War, and when he came back he had a picture postcard of a great big tire stood up on its tread. And that’s what I wanted to see, but I never got to. I got married instead on the way to no place special. Then I met you.”

She smiles up at me sweetly and puts her hand inside my thigh in a way she hasn’t quite done before, and I have to keep from swerving and causing a big pile-up. We are just now passing Exit 9, New Brunswick, and I take a secret look over along the line of glass booths, only two of which are lighted OPEN and have cars pulling through. Indistinct, gray figures lean out and lean back, give directions, make change, point toward surface roads for weary travelers. What could be more fortuitous or enticing than to pass the toll booth where the toll-taker’s only daughter is with you and creeping up on your big-boy with tender, skillful fingers?

“Do you like my name?” She keeps her hand close up on my leg, her built-on fingernails doing a little audible skip-dance.

“I think it’s great.”

“Is that right?” She squinches her nose again. “I never liked it, but thanks. I don’t mind Arcenault. I like that. But Vicki sounds like a name you’d see on a bracelet at Walgreen’s.” She glances at me, then back toward the wide estuary and wetlands of the Raritan, stretching like wheat to the tip of Staten Island and the Amboys. “Looks like someplace the world died out there, doesn’t it?”

“I like it out there,” I say. “Sometimes you can imagine you’re in Egypt. Sometimes you can even see the World Trade Center.”

She gives my leg a friendly pinch and turns me loose to sit up straight. “Egypt, huh? You probably would like that. You’re in from the nut department, too. Tell me what that little boy of yours died of?”

“Reye’s.”

She shakes her head as though mystified. “Boy-shoot. What’d you do when he died?”

This is a question I’m not interested in exploring, though I know she wouldn’t ask if she weren’t concerned about me and felt some good could come out of it. She is as much a literalist in these matters as I am, and much more savvy about men than I am about women.

“We were both sitting beside his bed. It was early in the morning. Before light. We may have been asleep, really. But a nurse camé in and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr.