The drive carried on, all garbled talk radio and forest green mile markers and Alec listing off things we needed to do once we got to California: buy a box fan, change our mailing address, get a parking permit. Boring, boring, boring. Around Vegas I asked if he’d ever go hiking with me. He turned to look at me, revealing soft pockets of darkness under his eyes. He hadn’t slept the night before—at dawn I found him sitting upright in the hotel bed reading Les Misérables, shoveling ranch-flavored corn nuts into his mouth.

“You’re free to go hiking without me,” he said.

“But I want to go together.”

“We’ll do other things together.” He was using his lecherous voice—he reached over and squeezed my thigh. “Did I mention I’m glad you’re coming with me?”

“Well, nobody wants to move alone.”

He kept his eyes on the road. “That is the kind of comment I will choose to ignore.”

I was not without a point. So far, he’d seen to it that the move lacked all romance. He put a deposit down on the house in California without consulting me and then fell asleep an hour into our going-away party, snoring away on the sofa as my friends and I danced to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on the coffee table beside him. Most of our conversations over the past few weeks had revolved around how to best pack his dishware. At one point I asked if he thought I was his assistant. “If you were my assistant,” he said, “I’d be paying you.”

I turned and watched the desert spit out tumbleweed. It was just like in the spaghetti westerns, all red sand and saguaros. About every other minute a semi came hurtling past us, plastic truck nuts swinging from the trailer hitch.

Already, I missed Kansas.

California was supposed to be better in every way: better food, better weather, better people. In movies, the West Coast was a utopia of beaches and liberal politics, hippies high-fiving scientists at the farmers market. Meanwhile, redwoods and cheap tacos and Yosemite! My Kansas friends feigned jealousy, although they too were heading out for other lands: Madrid, Seattle, a rustic lodge in the Rocky Mountains.

Alec had his own campaign, whose main platform was that California was not Kansas: no snowstorms or tornados or governors trying to arm children with rifles. Plus, he’d gotten a job near Sacramento, teaching French literature at a university. The job didn’t pay well, but it was—back to his main point—very much not in Kansas.

The university town was not by water or mountains, but somewhere vaguely between—the Central Valley. “It’s the best of both worlds!” Alec promised. He had promised many things over the course of our relationship: that he would only smoke cigarettes after sundown, that I could borrow his car without asking so long as I was sober, that he would love me ferociously. This was his word: ferociously. So far, he’d made good on everything, which I credited to his advanced age. He was twelve years older than me and had been my French teacher. Technically he was a lecturer—he had his eyes on tenure that would likely never be his, because as much as he wanted to be French, the truth was that his real name was Alex and he came from a poor farming town in upstate New York where people ate pigs’ feet and married their first cousins. That his life and career were turning into something of a failure was entirely his problem, and yet sometimes it felt like my own. I’d just graduated with a degree in linguistics and couldn’t think of anything better to do than follow him. What was a young woman supposed to do with her life? The answer probably should have been: Anything! Everything! She’s politically liberated! But something in my gut—perhaps fear masquerading as love—was urging me to stick with Alec. Plus, I had very little money.