There's no greater feeling in the world than a ride with Jerry. He drives a red Trans-Am with the doors welded shut like the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazzard. We tear around town with the t-tops off and the wind blowing so hard we have to squint our eyes almost shut. We do seventy in a forty-five zone, bounce so hard over train tracks we lift out of our seats and slam back down. I trust Jerry's driving, though. It's like he's on a track that won't let us go off course, like the roller coaster we used to take dates on at the high school Pecan Festival. It rattled and shook so hard as it cranked around a corner, the girls would cling to us as if we could save them. And we held the girls closer, gripping the sharp ripples of their ribs, then further, the soft bulges of their breasts. It was a nice feeling, even if it was artificial, thinking that if we held on tight enough we could actually do something for them

Connie, my fiancé, doesn't know I'm with Jerry. She thinks I'm at a job fair back home in Port Arthur, in the southeast Texas swamp, trying to get on full-time with one of the oil refineries so we can get out of Dallas, where we ran off to together to get away from the traps of home. After four years being away and three years being engaged, though, it's a different story. The city was fine, Connie says, for school, for starters, for a while. But it's not where you want to build a family.

So I'm supposed to fly in, take a shuttle to the job fair, stay in the Motel 6 across from the airport, and fly home in the morning with some better job prospects. It's that, she tells me, or I take over the family store, Sal's Grocery. The store that my grandfather built and went to his grave struggling to maintain. The store that my dad took over, broke himself for, and is now letting go under while my mom stands by and watches him go under. He won't go to the store, she's told me, and he won't discuss the store, and he won't listen to her discuss it. He's neither drunk nor lazy, just beaten by the impossibility of running an out-of-its-time mom-and-pop grocery.

The natural thing, of course, would be for me to take my turn in line, put my sweat and my soul into turning the place around, give Connie and my mom both what they want. On the phone, my mom hints about such things. She often calls and asks for Connie so they can have long conversations about this and that wonderful little house for sale just down the street from the store. Connie couldn't care less about the store. It's just an option, a job, a way to get us home.

I have a job, I remind them both, but Connie says I need something more stable. She's a counselor for the State Employment Commission. She finds jobs for people who can't find jobs for themselves. But I'm stable enough. In Dallas I write brochures, pamphlets-stuff, I admit, that nobody reads-for industrial companies nobody knows exist. It's not saving the world, but I'm good at it. I know the lingo and how to translate it from a language nobody understands into something that sounds human and necessary. Which is really no different from what I do with Connie.

The night before I left for the job fair-or Jerry's-Connie turned to me in bed.

"I audited eighty-seven applications today," she said.

By which I knew she meant she was exhausted. I squeezed the back of her neck, and she rolled onto her stomach and buried her chin into her frilly-laced pillow. I rubbed my thumb up her neck and into her hair. She moaned a little, which meant I was to keep it up. After a while she rolled over onto her back and stretched her arms above her head. The little flecks of deodorant in the pit of her underarm smelled like baby powder.

"Know how many were eligible for benefits?" she asked.

I waited. She didn't expect an answer.

"Thirteen," she said.

And when she repeated it, "Thirteen," I knew how serious she was about being done with her job, getting out of the city, getting married, settling down with a family. Which was why she wanted me to go to Port Arthur, where the job fair and the store are only minutes apart. I'm good at translating those little things.

Sitting at a stoplight in Jerry's Trans-Am, I hold tight to a bottle of Boone's Apple Wine-a high school trademark. The wine ripples in the bottle as the engine vibrates the car. When I agreed to go to the job fair-with strict plans to avoid the store and my parents-I called and told Jerry I'd be flying in. He was all for picking me up at the airport. No way was there anything else to do, he said, but stay with him and let him drop me off in the morning in time to fly out. He told me I had to see his new place. His spread, he called it. He was excited, and with Jerry that's contagious. It was certainly better than a lonely Motel 6 room, which was even preferable to staying at my parents', facing my mom's neediness, my dad's distractedness. Facing the collapse of the store and my role among all of that.

When the light changes, Jerry peels off a thirty foot trail of black rubber and a gray cloud of smoke. We howl along with the tires as the car fishtails, shudders, finally straightens out. Boone's sloshes in my stomach, and the streets, cars, buildings veer around like we're stable and it's the world that spins past us.

Stereo speakers fill the back seat and thump drum hits so hard I feel my heart pause, then beat with the rhythm. I've heard that's medically possible. Makes sense that a ride with Jerry could prove it. Jerry installed the stereo himself, and sometimes it overheats and shorts out, leaving us to fill the dead air with small talk. When that happens, we keep the discussion simple.

"Where we going?" I ask.

Jerry adjusts his three hundred dollar, aviator-style sunglasses. "Crazy," he says.

Never, never, when Connie's in the car would I drive the way Jerry does. And it scares the hell out of me when she drives. She's aggressive, mean, and she swerves from lane to lane to find an opening so she can rip past slow drivers. She cusses at them as she goes by.

Connie drives her white Nissan Sentra with the windows up and the air turned low so it barely blows. She's got thin blood from having thyroid disease. It makes her cold all the time, and that makes her moody. In the car, I wear a t-shirt and shorts while she wears a sweater, blouse, jeans, and still swipes the vents away so they don't blow on her.

I sneak glances at the speedometer to see how much over the limit she is. I'm quick about it, and I never say anything so she won't think I'm checking on her, but on the way to her endocrinologist's the day before I left for Jerry's, Connie caught me looking.

"You want to drive?" she asked, and whipped into the other lane so fast that my head banged the window.

In the silence the rest of the way there, I realized how little has to be said for us to communicate quite clearly.

It cracks me up the way Jerry is so amused by the simplest things, things I haven't thought about in years. He likes to drive to McDonald's and see if any of the little plastic balls from the kids' play area have rolled out into the parking lot. There's this big container of balls the size of oranges, and the kids get in and swim around in the balls and throw them out.

In high school, we collected the balls and brought them to marching band practice. No stealing them from the play area itself-too easy-you had to find them in the parking lot. We played this game where the idea was to toss a ball into the bell of one of the sousaphones as they marched past. There we'd be, lined up to form precise and ridiculous geometric shapes, the band directors screaming for us to pull it together for the grand finale notes, and in a blur of motion Jerry would commando-roll out of place, his trumpet tucked neatly under his arm, fling a ball toward a passing sousaphone, and swing back into place just in time for the band's final flourish. We wanted to see if the ball would shoot back out when the sousaphone player blasted that hard last note. In cartoons it would work.

"There's one," Jerry says.

We screech to a stop at the back of the McDonald's parking lot, and Jerry climbs out of the window. I stay in the car and watch as he picks up the ball and rolls it around in his hand, inspecting it.

"Cool," he says. "Been needing a yellow one."

He tosses the ball into the car through the open T-top and does a shuffling dance. It's a cross between a chicken strutting its head and a bull stomping its hoof-Jerry's famous jig. I haven't seen that in years, and it forces a laugh from me, which spurs Jerry on more furiously, breath heaving, legs and arms flailing, belly bouncing. His stomach certainly is stouter than it used to be, his legs stiffer. He used to really fly at that jig. But no way could you tell that to Jerry, a guy who climbs in and out of his car windows because of a TV show he watched as a kid, when anyone else-me included as I come to think of it-would wonder how Jerry gets in and out of his car when it's raining and he can't leave the T-tops off, the windows down.

I drove Connie home from the endocrinologist's, one hand on the wheel, the other on her thigh. The doctor had done a full blood panel, and when we left, Connie staggered out to the car-white, trembling against my shoulder, and so cold I flinched as I took her by the elbow to steady her. I wanted to hold her so close that my breath would warm her. I wanted to breathe my health into her.

I drove with the air turned off, the windows cracked open just a bit. Sticky drops of sweat rolled under my arms and down my ribs like tiny tongues. The tight clutch of the heat pressed against my eyes, my nostrils, my lungs. It was all I could do, and I hated myself for it. I crept along at twenty-five in a thirty zone, sticking to the stop-light-riddled back-roads instead of the sweeping Dallas highways, and still cars swerved past, blinding me with flashes of sunlight off their windows. Connie stared straight ahead at a chip in the windshield. I'd have to get that fixed for her before it got worse.

"We'll get you a donut," I said. Sugar would help. "And some nice hot chocolate. How about that?" I didn't expect an answer. I just wanted to talk to her, reassure her.

At a stoplight, as I watched the heat waves hovering over the hood, Connie dropped her hand on top of mine. It's a strange feeling, your sweat smearing between your hot and someone's cold skin. I felt her hand tremor, tighten, and loosen against mine. It felt like tiny love squeezes.

Jerry tells me he's seen a doctor about getting put on Ritalin. We're headed out of the city limits and toward Jerry's new place, away-something reminds me, though guilt is not quite what I'd call it-from the store, my parents, and the job fair. It's all winding two-lane roads through tall pine trees out here, and Jerry's stuck behind some guy in an old diesel pick-up. Black smoke chokes us.

"Why do you want Ritalin?" I ask. This four-page questionnaire I found under my foot on the floorboard is the reason Jerry brought it up. The heading on the form reads "A.D.D./A.D.H.D. and You."

Jerry swerves into the other lane but has to swerve back as a minivan from the opposite direction blows its horn and whooshes past. Not a second goes by before Jerry jolts back into the other lane and punches the gas. The engine roars and the Trans-Am jumps. Jerry blows his horn as we leave the old truck in a cloud of gravelly dust.

"Doctor said it might help," Jerry says.

"Help what?"

"What's it matter? Anything that needs help."

"But what needs help?"

Jerry holds the wheel with one hand and rummages behind his seat with the other. He pulls out a CD, looks at it, tosses it aside and reaches for another. There's a pile of CDs on the rear floorboard-no cases, just loose CDs. The yellow ball and two empty bottles of Boone's roll around back there too.

I look back at the questionnaire. Out of the forty questions, Jerry answered up to number sixteen. "Nevermind," I say.

"It's nothing," he finally says. "Just Dad wanted me to check into it."

Since we graduated from high school, Jerry's father has been trying to prep Jerry to take over the family RV shop. Jerry works odd jobs at the shop. Sometimes he takes titles and licenses to the registration office, or sometimes he drives an RV out to some old retired couple. But mostly Jerry's made a hell of a life just laying low and taking the ridiculous amounts of money his father throws at him just to keep Jerry interested.

I try to imagine an even keel Jerry. But I don't think there's a large enough dosage for that.

I got Connie undressed and into bed, under a blanket, watching afternoon reruns on TV-a comfortable sedative given the whacked out chemicals in her blood. The doctor changed her medication, which messes with her thyroid levels and guarantees she'll be under for a while. It can take days, weeks, before she's used to the new levels. She's told me before that she can feel the chemicals sludging through her veins like thick, dark gumbo down your throat.

Her eyelids wavered when I talked to her, but they barely lifted. "Uhn," she mumbled, and her hand patted the bed beside her. Reflexes, sure, but there was more to it than simple physical flinches. Though it was bright daylight out, I stripped and lay down beside her. She rolled toward me, nudged close, and wrapped herself around me.

"Nga nga," she said, two slurred syllables meaning, love you.

In bed, Connie wears a t-shirt, flannel pajama pants and thick, fuzzy socks that make my legs itch. She likes to tangle her legs with mine and lay her head in the bend of my arm. After a while, my legs sweat and my arm falls asleep, so I wake up with the sheets sticking to me and my arm limp, tingling. Usually I shuffle around enough that she rolls away with a moan, "Mmm." Why can't you just lie still and hold me? she means. And, Why do you push me away?

She talks in her sleep a lot. It's not so much her talking that keeps me up, though. It's that I understand what she means.

Jerry's got this spread all to himself-a ranch, really-outside of town, in the country, with a four bedroom house, a pool, tennis courts, a barn, a pond. There's fish in the pond, he tells me, but I don't see how you'd fish in it with its thick, green layer of algae and the wall of cattails around its bank. Beyond the pond is a cow pasture-there are no cows, as far as I see-and beyond that begins a solid thicket of woods. The nearest house we passed is hidden behind trees, around a curve in the potholed road that's crumbling into gravel.

We stand on the driveway, while behind us the Trans-Am ticks as it cools, stinking of burnt oil. Jerry doesn't seem to notice.

"Wait till you see this, man," he says. He lifts his sunglasses and raises his eyebrow to indicate how far beyond words this will be. For the moment, it seems he's forgotten the plastic yellow ball in his backseat. "Just wait till you see this."

On the front wall of the garage, beside the door, is an alarm keypad. You wouldn't expect that by the look of things-overgrown weeds and sticker burrs in the yard, rain gutters stripping free of the roof of the house, windows opaque with dirt, some of the wooden slats of the garage door rotten and others loose.

Jerry puts his hand on the keypad, looks over his shoulder to the left, then to the right. I look too and notice that the tennis courts have a chain-link fence for a net. It's at least a foot taller than the net should be. Does he know that? When I look back, Jerry has pushed his sunglasses back down over his eyes. He punches numbers into the keypad. I see that the code is 007.

"Bond," Jerry says, as the garage door lifts open. "Jerry Bond."

He poses with his hands together in the shape of a gun, and as soon as the door has lifted a foot from the ground he dives underneath and rolls into the darkness of the garage. There's a white flash of Jerry's belly, and the oomph and pant of hard breathing from too sudden a motion. I'm also a little heavier and a lot slower than I used to be. The difference is, I know it. I wait for the door to rise all the way, squealing and rattling along the curve of its track. I plug my ears and step back in case something falls. When the garage door bangs into place, open completely, there's Jerry, standing inside with his legs spread, his arms out wide, lifted in victory-or a frozen jumping jack. Behind him is an entire arcade of games. He has all the classics: Space Invaders, Centipede, Pac-Man, Galaga. Along one wall is a full-sized Skee-ball track.

Waiting for me to say something, Jerry glows as bright as any of the games.

But the swirling blip and ring and flash stun me, so all I can manage is, "You got to fix that door."

"You going to help me out here?" Jerry says this over his back while he starts a game of Galaga.

Anyone besides Jerry would have to replace the garage door to keep it from coming down on his head. I know this. I'd try telling him that, but I also know it's been a long, long time since Jerry and I held the top score on Galaga. I join in as player two and we mash the buttons, slam the joysticks, save the world from alien invaders.

Mornings after Connie's slept hard, she wakes up horny as a west Texas toad. I waste no time giving her what she wants, and afterwards she slings the sheets back and hurries to the bathroom. The lights flicker when she turns on her little portable heater. With sweat tickling the insides of my ears, I cannot imagine how she can be cold. I listen as she pulls off her t-shirt and socks-she keeps them on during sex because I kick the covers away-and then I hear her feet pad on the floor, followed by the click and twang of the scale as she steps on it. She always weighs herself after we have sex, as though some weight has either been lifted or added-I'm not sure which. And I can't figure it out because Connie doesn't seem to know either.

What I am sure about is whether her weight is up, down, or the same as last time. I can tell by how long she stays on the scale, how long before the spring twangs and her feet pad back onto the floor. The longer she stays on, the worse it is-as though she stands over the numbers, daring them to go higher, willing them to drop lower.

Connie is not fat. She hardly weighs over a hundred pounds, but she says she's losing her tone. And she is, there are small dimples forming around the loosening skin at the backs of her thighs-the natural filling out of her body. She will not listen, though, when I tell her she's beautiful.

The morning I left for Jerry's, or the job fair as Connie thinks, I walked into the bathroom and found her naked and staring at herself in the mirror, the heater cranked up and putting out some serious heat. She should have been dressed and ready to take me to the airport.

"Wow," I said, meaning she could have gotten sunburned from the heat. She looked at me in the mirror.

"What? My pooch?" She ran her hand across the scoop of her stomach and over the curve just beneath her belly-button. "I'm fat. I know. Don't stare." Which meant that her portable furnace wasn't putting out the only heat in the bathroom.

"You're-"

"Don't."

Connie stood naked and turning red from heat and frustration, pushing thirty and hating that her job was telling people they don't qualify, worrying that I was going to back out of our marriage and find someone younger, prettier, healthier, and knowing that all she could do was cling tighter to me, pin me to a home, children, a more stable job-even, if it came down to it, one that's ruined two generations of my family-and hate herself for doing it. I saw that and knew she was filled with a fear that the twang and click of the scale could never measure.

I'd like to believe it was the heat in that bathroom that made my head suddenly feel full of smoldering cotton-balls. But what it was, was that I stood there knowing full well that as much as I wanted to do anything in the world for her, all I could think of doing right then was getting out of that smothering room, heading to Jerry's, and keeping as far as possible from the job fair or the store.

"Should I call a cab?" I asked. Then, "And maybe get a goodbye kiss?"

My eyes feel like they've been peeled. Jerry lies sprawled, belly swelling and shrinking as he breathes, on a squeaky old futon that won't stay folded into a couch. It's the same one he slept on in high school-it was perpetually in bed form then too-and now he keeps it in his garage. Above the futon, also just like in high school, he has a sign from a gas station. "Stop Here For Service," it says. It used to double us over with laughter.

No fewer than seven bottles of Boone's litter the garage-you lose count after a few of them. Jerry and I have been playing arcade games all night. He's got piles of tokens to feed the games, so you don't have to use real quarters. There's this whining tone stuck in my ears, like I've taken a punch to the head. We've set the high score on every two-player game in here.

I have to wonder what Jerry does with all these when he's alone, who he bought them for, if he just listens to them blip, watches them flash, waits for someone to visit so he can show them off. I suppose he brings dates out here, where they sit on the futon, under the service sign and watch Jerry flip out over these silly games they thought-and hoped-had disappeared from the earth.

"Shit," Jerry says, and sits up like the futon's spring-loaded. "I forgot."

"What?" I follow him out of the garage and to his car, where he grabs the yellow ball from his backseat.

"This," he says, and tosses the ball up and catches it one-handed. It's hard to tell if he knows that his other hand is wrapped around yet another bottle of Boone's. "You have to see."

Behind the garage is Jerry's swimming pool, and this pool is filled with the balls he scavenges. There is no water in it, except maybe some rainwater down at the bottom. I practically do this eyes-bugged-out, cartoon character thing trying to believe what I see. I can't imagine how long it's taken him to collect all these plastic balls and fill his pool with them. Jerry tosses in the yellow one, then takes another swig of Boone's. I wave it off when he offers me the bottle. I do not want to have to use his bathroom again.

Using the bathroom in his house between games all night-the only time either of us went inside at all-I saw that there's not a stitch of carpet inside. Not even a rug. Jerry's lived here over a year, and what there are, are these thin wood slats lying in the doorways where the carpet from one room is supposed to meet the carpet from another. You have to be careful to step over the little nails that stick up from those slats. Only a couple of rooms even have furniture. The living room has a couch, but that's it, and the kitchen has a folding card table piled with empty cereal boxes and McDonald's wrappers. You can smell the days-, weeks-old grease-aged and crusted over.

Which is a little how I feel, swaying drunk and exhausted in front of Jerry's pool.

"What if you want to swim?" I ask.

"You can." Jerry puts down the Boone's and does a cannonball into the pool, sending a wave of little plastic balls skittering past my feet. He sinks in up to his neck, then scrambles around until he's lying on his back and windmilling his arms in a backstroke.

"Don't even have to get wet," he says, and splashes an armload of balls at me. And what do you say to that? As I cannonball onto Jerry, burying us both deep in the balls, I realize he might be onto something. To swim in his pool, you don't have to take off your clothes and expose the hidden folds and wrinkles you've gained, the little reminders that you're not who you'd like to be.

Connie will not go to the swimming pool at our apartments. The water's too cold, she says. What she doesn't say is that she won't go because there are too many other people out there, and she will not wear a swimsuit in front of them. She'll hardly wear one in front of me.

Instead of going outside, she finds projects to do inside the apartment. We paint walls, move furniture, hang curtains. With each change she steps back and squints, her head tilted to the right, holding her hair back with her left hand-Connie's contemplative pose. When she does that, I do not watch her eyes. I look at the flaking polish on her toenails, at the specks of paint on her calves, the few loose strands of hair dangling at her cheeks. By the way she moves, I know if the job is finished.

What I know that I cannot tell Connie, though, is that the job will never be finished. Not even when we're out of the apartment, out of the city, settled back home in Port Arthur with a spread like Jerry's. Then there'll be a yard to keep, more rooms to decorate, more space between us.

When I first fell in love with Connie, all I saw was what a potentially great couple we made. I saw the sensual touches of sex and the touches that were too sensual for sex. I saw us aging beautifully into our eighties, our nineties, finishing each other's sentences or not even having to start them. I didn't imagine that the things we'd talk about, the things that mattered, would be furniture, job fairs, failing family businesses, and medication. And I never imagined what it would be like to actually know what someone else was thinking just by the way she held her head. Being that connected to someone seemed beautiful because it seemed impossible.

But it's not impossible. What it is, is terrifying.

I wake up on Jerry's poolside patio, shivering and so charged with adrenaline that I feel it in my blood like you feel hot liquid go down your throat and fill you with an odd hardness. I'm drenched with dew and blinking at pink blades of sunrise coming through the pine trees behind Jerry's pond. The plastic Wal-mart patio furniture we fell asleep on is surprisingly comfortable, and yet I sit up tingling, breathless, head spinning like a survivor wrenched from a head-on collision.

Not two feet away, a yellow ball cuddled into the bend of his elbow, Jerry mumbles in his sleep. But the nice thing-what calms me-is that I can't understand a word of it. And I don't think Jerry's mumbling woke me up any more than I think the sunrise did or the realization that even Jerry would have to have bought boxes of those balls to fill his pool with them. What woke me up is the sound of a siren from the highway. It isn't even close, just an echo bouncing through the pine trees. But I know why it woke me up, why I jolted upright shuffling against sheets that aren't there. It's absurd, here, so far from Connie, that I should come out of a passed-out sleep thinking, It's okay, it's not her, she's fine.

In a couple hours I'll fly back to Connie and wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight against me until she pushes away and asks about the job fair. I could lie. I could kiss her, slide my fingers between hers, and say that it was a bust. She'd know I was lying but would not say a word. And neither of us would mention the store, that final option, so obviously inevitable that she's known all along she didn't have to push it. Later in bed, though, while she slept and mumbled, I'd hear the truth and hate that she had to say it herself.

"We have to go."

But Jerry doesn't seem to hear me, and it takes no small amount of prodding to get him awake and out of his dreams. It's not until I snatch the yellow ball from his grip that he sits up, blinking, sniffling, beginning to realize that though he cannot imagine why, someone else might have a reason for being up this early.

"Time is it?" he asks.

"We have a couple hours."

"Hours?" The idea takes a moment to settle on him. Then he waves me off and lies back down. "Damn, man. It's like ten minutes to the airport. And give me back my ball." He doesn't turn toward me, but his hand comes out, flexing and closing, demanding the ball.

I know good and well it'll take us at least twenty minutes to get to the airport, even the way Jerry drives. If it were Connie and me, I'd allow us a good forty-five minutes just to be safe. But isn't that, after all, the reason it's so nice to hop in Jerry's car with the t-tops off, close your eyes in the wind, ride that track he seems to be on, and know it won't go off course?

I tuck the ball tight against my side. "Souvenir," I say. What I don't say, though, what Jerry would never understand, is that the track he's on is nice for starters, for a while, but it's not saving the world.

Back in Dallas, Connie picks me up outside the airport terminal. Sun and crowd and traffic glimmer in her Sentra's windows as we exchange a casual hug and kiss. It's the kind of casual that only the deeply connected can achieve-no exhibition necessary. Beneath her cardigan sweater and t-shirt I feel the fragile strength of Connie's ribs. I am forever amazed at how wonderfully alive yet terribly delicate her body feels pressed against me.

"So," she says, breaking the hug and stepping back into her contemplative, is-the-job-finished pose. "Have fun?" By which she means she knows I didn't go near the job fair or the store. She no doubt knew all along that I wouldn't, and I know she isn't so much disappointed that I didn't do what I was supposed to as she is saddened that I did exactly what she anticipated I would.

"Fun?" I say. "Not exactly."

"Not for lack of trying, though, right?" She adds a smile that's both tired and forgiving.

"Right," I answer, then realize I'm still clinging to Jerry's yellow ball. I hand it to Connie, who accepts it for the childish offering it is. "Tried like crazy."

For a moment as a bus whooshes past us, adding to the overhead echo of planes taking off and landing, we breathe exhaust and don't say a word. All around us people are coming and going, arriving and departing, escaping from and escaping to the same places and things over and over-the traps of home. And amidst all of the busy travelers and traffic Connie is beautiful and we love each other.

"Ready to head home?" I finally say. We have never referred to the apartment or Dallas as home. I suppose we never will.

"Been waiting on you," Connie says and tosses me the car keys. Then she gets in the passenger seat and begins swiping the air vents away from her.

But I push her little Sentra so hard it can barely draw power enough to blow cold air. I peel out, jerking us back against our seats. Connie cups the yellow ball in her hand, and I grip my fingers between hers so I hold both the ball and Connie's hand. Never, never before have I driven like this with Connie in the car-one-handed, dangerous, beautifully terrifying. Which is how we sweep up onto the freeway, dart through gaps in traffic, careen and swerve and rip across the city-the Pecan Festival roller coaster, holding tight to Connie, when all either of us wanted was for me to pretend I was protecting her while she pretended I could.