“Lousy.” The first sip of water is wonderful. The second is even better.

“Don’t drink too much,” says Mimi. “It could upset your stomach.”

I sit back and let the afternoon sun warm my face. All things considered, it feels good sitting here, doing nothing.

“Why’d you give them money?”

Mimi shrugs. “I felt sorry for them.”

“They were crooks.”

“They were kids.”

“This part of your ‘save the world’ tour?”

“The skinny one reminded me a little of Nathan.” Mimi puts her arm around my shoulders. “What about Eugene and the Other Demons? I’ll bet Kitty has something to say about your little episode.”

“Nope,” I tell Mimi. “As soon as I started to puke, they took off.”

Mimi takes out the guidebook. “As I see it, we have two choices. One, we can go back to the hotel.”

I close my eyes and imagine we’re back in Guelph having a sandwich at Miijidaa or the Boathouse. “What’s number two?”

“As it turns out,” says Mimi, “it’s close by.”

“What’s close by?”

Mimi smiles and pats my cheek. “The Prague Zoo.”

THE YEAR I TURNED eighteen, I stole a car. Well, technically, I didn’t steal it. It was more an unauthorized borrowing. My mother was friends with a woman whose husband was a doctor. I didn’t know Dr. Philips all that well, but what I did know was that he had a car.

A 1960 red Plymouth Fury convertible.

Mom didn’t have a car, couldn’t afford one. I don’t think she even had a licence. I didn’t have a licence either, but I knew how to drive.

One of my best friends in high school was Doug Crook. Doug’s father owned a service station on Washington, and Doug and I would drive cars around his father’s lot. We’d park them, move them in and out of the service bays, take them around the block when no one was looking.

I could drive anything. Standard. Automatic. It didn’t matter. If it had wheels and a motor, I could drive it.

Anyway, whenever Dr. Philips and his wife went to Hawaii, they’d get my mother to collect the mail and check on the house to make sure everything was working, and they’d hire me to cut their grass and water the yard.

And they’d leave their car in the garage, where the battery might go dead and the carbon could build up on the cylinders. So, if you looked at it from the standpoint of automotive maintenance, I was doing them a favour.

MIMI WAS JUST KIDDING about the zoo.