Bascombe, Ralph has expired.’ We both just sat there a few minutes, stunned, though we knew it was going to happen. And then she cried a while and I did, too. And then I went home and cooked up some bacon and toast, and ended up watching television. I had a tape of great NBA championships, and I watched that until it got light.”

“Death’ll make you nutty, won’t it?” Vicki rests her head on the seat back, pulls her feet up, and hugs her shiny black knees. Far ahead I see a plane—a great jet—floating earthward where I know Newark airport to be; it is a promising sign. “You know what we did when my Mama died?” She glances up, as if to see if I’m still here.

“No.”

“We all went out and ate Polynesian. It wasn’t a big surprise or anything, either. She had everything you can have and I was working right in Texas Shriners and knew everything from talking to the doctors, which I don’t think is really that good. Everett and Daddy, Cade and me, though, went out to the Garland Mall in the middle of the hot afternoon and ate poo-poo pork. We just wanted to eat. I think you want to eat when someone dies. Then we just went and spent money. I bought a gold add-a-bead necklace I didn’t need. Daddy bought a three-piece suit at Dillards’ and a new wristwatch. Cade bought something. And Everett bought a new-used red Corvette he probably still owns, I guess. He did have it.” She extends her lower lip over the other one and focuses down beetle-browed on the visible memory of Everett’s Corvette, which stands out now more than death. Her nature is to put her faith in objects more than essences. And in most ways that makes her the perfect companion.

Her story, however, has left me with an unexpected gloominess. Some aspects of hidden-life-revealed have a certain bedrock factuality I don’t like. I’d be a braver soldier if the story had someone discovering they had Lou Gehrig’s disease or a brain tumor on the eve of his last track meet, and deciding to run anyway. But in this I am unprotected from the emotions—vivid ones—of true death, and I suddenly feel, whipping along the girdered Turnpike, exactly as I did that morning I described: bereaved and in jeopardy of greater bereavement sweeping me up.

Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling, though anything doesn’t go, of course, and never did.

Only this time the solace-spirit has been sucked out of the car by a vagrant boxcar wind, leaving my stomach twitching and my mouth grimmed as though the worst were happening. I have slipped for a moment out onto that plane where women can’t help in the age-old ways (this, of course, is something X said this morning and I passed off). Not that I’ve lost the old yen, just that the old yen seems suddenly defeatable by facts, the kind you can’t sidestep—the essence of a small empty moment.

Vicki eyes me in little threatening glances, her brows arched. “What’s the matter, did a bug bite you?”

If we were as far north as the Vince Lombardi Rest Area, I’d pull in and spend a half-hour admiring Vince’s memorabilia—the bronze bust, the picture of the Five Blocks of Granite, the famous gabardine overcoat. We have plenty of time today. But Vince’s Area is all the way past Giant’s Stadium, and we are here down among the flaming refineries, without a haven.