“What do you mean?”

“Means I got to ride in Finny again. Sitting in the passenger seat’s almost as good as sitting behind the wheel. For years there, all I did was run the engine with it sittin’ in the garage. Once or twice, thought about running a hose from the tailpipe in through the window, but I put that thought out of my head. So I’d put it in drive, go ahead a foot, put it in reverse and go a foot back. Almost as bad as when I was fifteen and I used to run my dad’s old Ford back and forth in the driveway.”

“You shouldn’t joke about killing yourself,” Katie said.

“Wasn’t a joke,” he said.

“Why would you want to do that?”

Bruce appeared pensive. “Before Barbara passed—this would have been ten years, no, eleven years ago—I was hitting the bottle pretty hard, and then after, I guess I was into it even harder, until I got that ticket, and, well, that smartened me up as far as the booze was concerned. But then, once I got sober, and realized there wasn’t much left to live for . . . the drinking kind of helped me forget that.”

“So,” Katie said, “what made you not do it?”

He smiled. “I was worried about who’d look after Finny.”

“You’re not serious,” she said.

“I know. It sounds crazy.”

Katie took a quick slurp of her coffee. “Look, I should go. Maybe Archie’ll realize the trouble he’s going to be in and come home. He might not get into trouble while he’s in the Arrival, but once he gets out, who knows what he’ll do.”

Bruce pursed his lips, slowly exhaled, then ran his tongue over his teeth.

“What?” Katie asked.

“Thinkin’.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “I thought I smelled something burning.”

“Why don’t we go look for him?”

Katie paused. “What do you mean? You mean, in the car?”

Bruce smiled slyly. “Yeah. In the car.”

“But regular cars—cars that people actually drive—aren’t supposed to be on the road right now. They’re not even supposed to be on the island. Everybody put them on the ferry and left them on the mainland. That’s why we’ve been doing my driving lessons at night. Remember?”

Bruce shrugged. “Maybe I don’t give a damn anymore.”

“Yeah, well, who are you planning on putting behind the wheel?”

“You,” he said. “You’re a good driver.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have a license. Did you forget about that, too?”

Bruce mulled that one over. “If we get stopped, we’ll say it was an emergency.” He thought about that. “I was out of eggs. Wanted to make an omelette, went to the fridge, didn’t have any goddamn eggs.”

“That is not an emergency,” Katie said.

“Oh yes, it is,” he said confidently. “You ever had one of my omelettes?”