Robin said, “I know three’s a crowd, but I won’t be any trouble. I bought a ticket and really want to go, except I don’t have anybody to go with.”

Glenna looked at me. “You should take her. I don’t think I can make it.”

Anger suddenly swelled up in me, and I felt as abandoned as I had watching Glenna dance. Robin must have seen a change in my expression because, acting out of character, she chose to exercise some tact by saying, “I’ll get the dessert.”

When she had gone into the house, I said to Glenna, “I thought you wanted to go.”

“Palmer has all these procedures scheduled for me to do.”

“Can’t they wait three days? I want you to come. Like you said you would.”

Glenna shrugged. “I’ve got to do them. I’ve got to get through this.”

“Through what? You hate doing it. All it does is piss you off.”

“You noticed?” She laughed, a short, unhappy sound.

“You can stop.”

Glenna said, “Not till I’m comfortable with it.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what I’m doing is right. And I want it to feel right.”

“And me going to Woodstock with Robin feels right?”

“I trust you.”

“Not Robin?”

“Not Robin,” she said. “You.”

The kayak had vanished. With the sun going down, the water had darkened to stone gray.

Glenna said, “Please, don’t hassle me about it. Let me do what I have to do.”

I nodded, then washed my anger down with another glass of Chianti, and Glenna soothed me with an exquisite smile, her eyes a deep shimmering green, like a memory of the ocean in a childhood summer.

Chapter 22

BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK on Friday morning, Robin and I had made it to the parking lot of the Goose Pond Inn in the town of Monroe. We had taken a Short Line bus upstate from Port Authority. Monroe was about fifty miles from the concert site, but in the city the buses heading closer to the festival—Monticello or Bethel—had been backed up. We’d heard on Robin’s transistor radio that 175,000 people were already there, and our plan was to hitch from Monroe, but I refused to stick out my thumb because the town cops kept passing by in their patrol cars, glowering at us and giving me the distinct impression that they would enjoy tossing some hippies in their jail.

Robin and I looked qualified. She was decked out like Lady Fidel Castro in a guayabera—a loose, white Cuban-style shirt—olive-drab pants with constellations of red commie stars sewn on the legs, and, to add a dash of capitalist panache, a ribboned straw kettle hat fancied by lady horse lovers from Churchill Downs to Saratoga. I had an army-surplus knapsack on my back and a Baggie of Robin’s pot hidden in my right sweat sock, and I wondered if it was legal for a cop to make you remove your shoes and socks like a mother checking if you’d washed your feet.