I already knew I wanted the job. I had known before I was sure there even was a job. There was the practical side: I was out of work, and a low-paying job was better than none. Besides, whatever hours they were offering, it had to be substantially less than I would’ve worked if I were back behind the wheel of a long-haul rig, where sometimes I might be on the road for ten or twelve days without returning home.

In truth, though, the practical side didn’t cross my mind until later. I was spending all day every day in the place where my parents had died and felt, from that first instant, that they’d sent me a set of wheels to escape in—like sending a truck to take me away from the world’s most joyless and dismal summer camp. Your ride is here, I thought, and my arms pebbled with gooseflesh. I could not help thinking that my mother had specifically avoided returning Another Marvelous Thing so I’d have to return it for her and in such a way be led back to the place where her story with my father began.

“What’d you say happened to your last guy?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” Ralph said. He twitched his mouth back and forth to move his still-unlit Liverpool pipe to the other corner of his mouth. “A local fellow, Sam Hennessy, got out of full-time trucking to focus on the two things he loved best, reading and making homebrew. He kept his Class B valid and offered to drive the new Bookmobile, just for something to do. Alas, Sam didn’t only enjoy making homebrew. He relished drinking it as well and took to enjoying a few on his lunch break. Well, he was out a month ago in our newish Bookmobile and began to worry he was a little crocked. He decided he could use some coffee and turned in to the nearest McDonald’s. And I do mean right into it. He put the front end straight through the wall and into a booth. No one sitting there, thank God. When you think of all the kids that eat in McDonald’s.” He shuddered, then asked if I wanted to look in the cab.

On the walk around the front, he pointed to a panel on the side of the truck. There was a diesel generator behind it that ran the lights and the heat in the book car. “The nearly new Bookmobile had a pair of computers for the patrons, but I wonder if tablets could serve the same function. Checking out the books is easy enough—it’s done through an app on your phone.” He had started to sketch the job out for me as if I’d already put in my application.