Two nights later, he sat on his front porch after work, drinking a beer. It was his fourth fall here and he couldn’t imagine getting sick of the evening light. He’d come to town as a transfer student at the university after two years of misery at Amherst, where both his parents and three of his cousins had gone. He hadn’t been able to deal with all the New England horseshit—the Barbour coats, the sports, the interest in the goddamned leaves. Plus, he was on the verge of failing out. On a trip home, a pothead friend from high school rambled at him about how state schools in the West loved out-of-state underachievers because they were usually willing to pay the hiked-up full tuition. Alex applied to the universities of Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico without telling his parents. When he finally told his father that he’d gotten into UM, his father told him he was disappointed that he wouldn’t graduate from Amherst, but not about paying twenty-five grand a year less for his education.

And, surprise, in a direct rebuke to American good sense, getting two thousand miles away from Massachusetts brought out a latent interest in literature and philosophy. The weed was better, the beer was cheaper, and he had teachers who were impressed by what he’d picked up in his previous years of overeducated sleepwalking. He managed to talk his way into some master’s seminars in English and film—“Women’s Pictures: Pym, Stanwyck, and the Uses of Melodrama”—and graduated with good grades and moderate camping skills. He stuck around town doing what there was to do, stocking shelves at the organic grocery store, hustling the occasional band profile for the alternative weekly. When the lone full-time employee of the small bookstore followed his girlfriend to Seattle, Alex was the first person the owner called, since he was the only customer under forty who bought hardcovers on a regular basis. He’d been writing staff picks and restocking the shelves now for a year, despite his father’s biweekly pleas for him to come back East and get a real job, or at least go to law school.