Wilson glances in the rearview mirror. “No one thinks you’re a villain, Ruth.”

“My brother is furious because we had plans, even though I’d invited him,” she continues, and here she lowers her voice, “I’m sure Isabelle’s furious because her uncle charmed her, and you’re furious because we’re a day behind in getting to your mother’s.”

“I’m furious?”

Ruth pictures her brother as she’d seen him early this morning through the glass doors of the den, his suitcase open at the foot of the fold-out couch, the blankets twisted around the hulk of his body, a bath towel draped over the back of an antique chair. She groans inwardly. “We shouldn’t have left him there,” she says.

“Like I said, Ruth, you could have stayed.”

“I didn’t want to stay, Wilson. I didn’t want him to stay either, but what was I supposed to do?”

The highway bends; around the corner, brake lights glow. “Shit,” Wilson mutters, slowing the car. “We’re never going to get there.”

“See, you are furious,” Ruth says.

“Ruth,” Wilson says.

“Well, I’m sorry.”

Wilson says nothing.

Ruth shuts her eyes. She is tired, but she will be a good sport, she tells herself again, just as Wilson was last night, rushing to get dinner for her brother as if it had been the plan all along. “Wil,” she says, opening her eyes. “I need to pee.”

Wilson pulls into the next rest stop as smoothly as he can, but when he glances at Isabelle in the rearview mirror as they come to a stop he sees that the change in momentum has woken her anyway.

Ruth opens the door partway and then turns to Isabelle. “Do you need to go?” she asks.

Isabelle shakes her head. Her cheek is ridged from pressing against the upholstery.

“We’ve got a couple more hours,” Wilson says. “Sure you’re okay?”

Isabelle nods. Exhaust fumes and cold air waft into the car as Ruth gets out and hurries in only her shirtsleeves to the bathroom. Wilson cranks the heat and pulls at a hangnail with his teeth. The trip to his mother’s as planned would have been short enough; to come all this way for only a night seems absurd, almost a waste. He feels rushed—there are things he wants to be sure to do. He wants to show Isabelle his old things, the stuffed animals and toys still in the upstairs closet, and he wants to have a bonfire, maybe, and he wants to ice-skate on the river, and he wants to have tea and boiled eggs and English muffins with his mother when it’s teatime. But by the time they get there, the weekend will already be half gone. He shouldn’t have agreed to this change of plans, he thinks, but then again, when he’d walked in the door last night and seen Ruth’s face as she sat across from Jimmy at the kitchen table, the tired, plaintive look she’d given her husband, a look that seemed to say, if nothing else, please, and help, he had been filled with a sense of responsibility and without question stepped into the role he knew was expected of him.