Fellis looked in the bed of his truck but found nothing.

“Throw the fucking floor mat out then,” he said.

I grabbed the wet floor mat and threw it on the side of the road.

We drove to Save ’n Shop twenty above the speed limit with the windows rolled down, and every minute or so I’d find a caterpillar crawling up my leg and I’d flick it out the window.

The parking lot to the store was full, and Fellis parked far out, the truck facing away from the store and toward a cornfield. I got out of the truck and went to the bed and lowered the hatch and sat on it. I didn’t see Fellis leave the store—I was watching this older woman lift her bags from her shopping cart and into the trunk of her blue car—but I noticed him halfway back to the truck, because he was swearing and waving a hand in the air. He held in one hand two white bags and in the other hand he held the Redbox case.

He got in the truck—so did I—and he threw the white bags onto the dashboard. He slammed the door shut.

“I forgot to put the fucking DVD in the case.”

I said we could go get it and bring it back, but Fellis said no, that we could do it another day.

“What’s one more late fee for Beth?” he said.

At the intersection Fellis turned left, and I asked if he remembered which way was home.

“I’m taking the highway and then the long loop back,” he said. “Air this fucker out.”

The long loop made no difference. We had to drive through that rotting road again, but before we hit the bridge we stopped at Jim’s and Fellis bought a pack of smokes, two thick cheap cigars, and two tall cans of Arizona Iced Tea. Before he pulled Einhell onto the bridge he parked along the road and we each lit one cigar and let the cab of the truck fill with thick smoke. We drove in a self-made fog that was nowhere but inside this machine, and it helped ward off the smell of bait enough for us not to gag, but we were gagging from the thick smoke by the time we got to his aunt Alice’s, and the clouds of smoke rolled out of the truck as Fellis got out and put the meds in her mailbox. He raised the little red flag.

. . .

I called Tabitha when we got back to Fellis’s. I leaned on the wall by the back door. Fellis was looking around the house for the Redbox movie, Transcendence.

“You were in the bathroom long enough,” Tabitha said.

“Fellis didn’t know what he was talking about,” I told her. “He gets like that after his treatment.”

Fellis yelled something at me from the living room, but I ignored him.