INSTEAD of asking a nurse, I talked to Dr. Spradling directly first thing the next morning. To my surprise, he agreed that Tolliver was doing well enough to travel a little, provided he didn’t lift anything or exert himself much.

Being able to travel a little made a wonderful change in Tolliver. It was as if he’d been thinking of himself as a sick person because he had to stay still. Now he thought of himself as a well person with temporary problems. I was delighted (and relieved) to see the resolution and decisiveness come back into his face and bearing. But I reminded myself to stay mindful that I had to take care of him.

Since we weren’t anchored to the hospital anymore, we checked out of the hotel. We didn’t know what would happen during the day or if we’d come back to Garland to spend the night.

It felt so good to drive away from the urban sprawl. We were back on the interstate, together. For an hour we were able to act like we were leaving our problems behind. But the closer we got to Texarkana, the more our questions and uncertainties bore in on us.

We went past the turnoff to Clear Creek, and I said, “We might have to stop here later.”

Tolliver nodded. We were pretty close to Texarkana by then, and we weren’t feeling chatty.

Texarkana straddles the state line, of course, and about fifty thousand people live there. A shopping area has grown up along the interstate passage through the north part of town, a shopping area with all of the usual suspects. We hadn’t lived close to that part of town. We’d lived in the raggedy part. Texarkana is not better or worse than any other southern town. Most of our classmates had come from decent homes, and they’d had decent parents. We’d simply drawn the short end of the stick.

The street where we’d lived was lined with trailers. Their virtue was that they weren’t packed together in little parks, at least where we’d been. They each had a little lot. Ours had been planted on its lot with the end toward the road, so you pulled into a rutted driveway and swung around to park in the front yard. Well, it was a yard in that it was a space in front of the trailer, but it never had had any grass, and the azaleas that had once been on either side of the concrete steps had been sickly bushes that were hardly worth the trouble.

Seeing it again was strange. We sat in the car, pulled to the side of the road, and looked at it without talking. A Latino walking by stared at us with a hard face. We no longer looked like we belonged here.

“What do you feel?” Tolliver asked.