ON THE DRIVE to Port Oriskany, two-hundred-odd miles to the west, Emmett was good-natured, even husbandly. He was proud of his car, a new Buick, and he clearly enjoyed driving—the simple act of driving, pressing down hard on the accelerator, gripping the wheel tight, easing in and out of traffic, passing everyone he could manage, even trucks careening along at ten miles beyond the speed limit. Marya noted his air of authority, his satisfaction, his well-being. She was grateful for the fact that much of the time he wasn’t aware of her at all (she could read a paperback book, she could scribble in her journal): except to ask her now and then to get him a beer from the back seat (if he couldn’t have it chilled he’d drink it warm—he wasn’t, as he said, fussy), or to tune the radio better, or to sit closer to him: so he didn’t get to feeling he was alone. When rain drummed on the roof and windshield and the headlights of oncoming cars rushed at them out of the mist Emmett said, with a tenderness in his voice Marya hadn’t heard often before, “Isn’t it nice in here . . . isn’t it safe?”

Marya lay against him, drowsily watching the highway. She hadn’t been able to sleep very well the night before; there had been a number of nights that summer that she’d lain awake, her mind racing, thinking of the university, of Port Oriskany (which she had never visited), of the fact that she would be only one of 15,000 students. . . . It was one thing to impress teachers in Innisfail, or to have struck the eye of, say, Clifford Shearing; it would be quite another thing to excel in so competitive a setting. If her grade-point average fell below a B for more than two semesters she would lose the merit scholarship. She hadn’t any idea how difficult college would be, Port Oriskany in particular, though the lawyer for whom she worked this summer, a man named Fowler, had gone to Port Oriskany before law school in Buffalo, and she thought him unexceptional: but he must have done fairly well as a student.

If I fail, Marya thought, if I have to come back home—I’ll kill myself.