She hugged him tightly but quickly, then she turned and walked up onto her porch and into the house. She tossed the truck keys onto her father’s bed and kept walking. Leo heard her door close and he wanted to run around to the side of the cabin and climb through her open window; he’d grab her by the shoulders and whisper her his whole story which was so much his mother’s story and his father’s too, and he’d tell Allie’s tired and pretty but listening face everything he knew about Katie Faye, about her never having gotten to Paris, about how he, Leo, looked just like her which meant, in a way, that she was still a kind of flesh of this world and he was taking it all to France. Don’t you see? And I never meant to hurt your feelings with those flowers, I never did. And he was already stepping into the shadows of the house, seeing the quiet love he and Allie would then make, her palms pulling against his moving back, her breath on his face. Rubber or not, they would start again, and she’d be here when he got back and—

“Goodby, Leo.” Mrs. Donovan leaned out the half-open screen door. She was wearing her African afghan. Her hair was down, and in the overhead glare of the porch bulb the lines in her face looked unnaturally deep. “Take care of yourself.”

Leo nodded. He waved. He walked back to the Valiant and drove home.

Ryder’s Impala was gone, and even though the kitchen and parlor were still lit up, the house was quiet. Leo knew Ryder wouldn’t have left without saying good-bye and so he figured all four of them had gotten hungry and gone down to the UFO Show or the club, he hoped not for long. He got out of the car as fast as if he were going someplace, and he thought about heading down the hill with a flashlight, picking up the scraps of Allie’s note, and taping it together back in his room. But no, she probably wrote something fine, something that after her too-fast good-bye just now would hurt to see in words, would leave him feeling even more like the wrong man on the wrong train speeding fast in the wrong direction.

Then he heard the toilet flush and he walked into the house as Jim came down the hall and stepped into the bright light of the kitchen. His mustache whiskers were wet just above the lip. “How’d it go?”

“Ryder gone?”

“He drove the girls to Helena’s car. I told him to hurry. He knows how early we’re getting up.” Jim walked to the table and cleared it of three empty Pabst cans and an ashtray full of cigarette butts rimmed with lipstick. He smiled as he dumped the cans and butts all into the waste basket under the sink, and Leo felt the skin of his face get hot; he didn’t feel like smiling and he didn’t think his father should be smiling either. “She’s got buck teeth, Dad.”