“Your mother’s? I’ve got to clue you—we’ve got a five-or six-day drive ahead of us, if we really push it, and the last thing I want is to get hung up at your mother’s house because you know she’s going to talk us to death and insist we spend the night.” He slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, in high spirits, bringing up the cat only because it amused him to imagine it curled up in the lap of some other young housewife in another building in another neighborhood altogether. They were free. All the details, major and minor, had been settled, and if he’d forgotten anything it was too late now. “Mexico, here we come!” he cried, putting the car in gear and lurching away from the curb.

“What’s wrong with visiting my mother?” she asked. “What if we did spend the night?—it’d save us on a motel room.”

“No way.” He gave her a smile, dodged round a fat man who suddenly flung open the door of a parked sedan and set one fat foot out on the pavement. “Didn’t we say we need to make miles, drive straight through as long as we can stand it?”

“Sure,” she said, crossing her legs and patting at her hair where the breeze through the open window whipped a loose strand across her lips. “I’m not disagreeing with you, Fitz. I want to get there as badly as you do—and Corey does too.” She swiveled in her seat to face their son. “Right, honey?”

No answer from the backseat. Corey had his comics, comics he’d been hoarding for just this moment, and there was no distracting him, not yet anyway.

“I’m just saying,” she went on, “it would be nice to see my mother, at least for a couple of hours, a pit stop, lunch, dinner, whatever—”

“We’re going to Mexico,” he said, “not Long Beach Island. Mexico, baby!” And he began singing “La Cucaracha,” just as they all had that night in Tim’s office, only altering the verse to drop the reference to marijuana because Corey was in the car and Corey had ears, comics or no. When he got to it, when he got to “Porque no tiene, porque le falta / Marijuana que fumar,” he substituted “Dinero para caminar.” And then he turned to look over his shoulder and asked Corey if he knew what that meant and Corey said he didn’t.

The car sailed on down the road, practically driving itself, and if a few spatters of rain began to tap at the windshield, what did it matter? They were on their way and there was no stopping them now. “Money, Corey,” he said. “The cockroach, he doesn’t have the money to travel.”