“Oh stop it!” she protests. “Why do you want me married, why do you care?” She sinks back, sobbing now with a muffled, burbling quality that suggests Billy is comforting her. Nelson can’t risk turning his head to look into the back seat; his sensation of a fifth person in the car is so strong he needs to strengthen his grip on the steering wheel.

Billy says, “Great going, Nelson. So that’s psychotherapy.”

“It helps to get things in the open,” he sulkily says. “Then you go from there.” He stares ahead. He has always disliked this flat side of Brewer, as opposed to the tilting Mt. Judge side. Serve-yourself gas stations with ranks of pumps, fast-food franchises with plastic mini-playgrounds for obese toddlers, dismal six-store strip malls, carpet-and-linoleum outlets, vegetable stands boarded up for the winter, cutesy Amish cut-outs beckoning ignorant tourists from the inner cities to Real Pa. Dutch Cuisine. He knows where he is now. If he stays on this new improved 222 a bypass will hurl him right around Brewer southwest toward Lancaster and the Turnpike; instead he turns off, by the mattress warehouse with the Aurora Massage Parlor tucked in behind, on old Route 111, which runs parallel to the river, the silhouette of Mt. Judge far to their right, crowned by the distant lights of the Pinnacle Hotel, where they had been, the four of them, sitting and eating and making polite conversation, a few hours ago. Time does wonders.

Pru says, twisting her head to talk to Annabelle, “So you got pawed. So did I. My father was a crumb-bum, when you think about it. It’s not the end of the world.” She is tough. Her nose looks sharp as a witch’s in profile but he senses her bulk, her body in the shimmery silk dress and rust-brown overcoat, as radiating warmth. Her long hands lie idle in her shadowy lap. He reaches down to adjust the car heat, and his own hand and Pru’s knees show similarly pale in the dash-light glow. He remembers how once when she was new to their family she surprisingly comforted him by telling him, Why, honey. I think from what I’ve seen your parents are quite fond of each other. Couples that have stayed together that long, they must have something.

In the back seat, his sister is sniffling and Billy is saying, “Easy, easy. We’re talking ancient history.”

The road has stoplights now, and up ahead somebody, a car dealer or club owner, has gone to the expense of renting a bank of searchlights; three of them stir the sky to the limits of the local haze.

“We are passing,” Nelson announces in a tour guide’s droning tone, “the former site of Springer Motors Toyota Agency, now derelict.”