It was. Just to see Corey so excited made everything cool, despite the heat that hammered them all the way down through the South and the Gulf Coast till half the time she was glued to the seat with her own sweat. Fitz was cool too, everything behind him now, exams, papers, his students, and when he wasn’t fiddling with the radio or quoting On the Road (“I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found”) he was humming or singing off-key renditions of Johnny Hartman, Sinatra, Nina Simone, tapping out the rhythm on the steering wheel. Once they crossed the Mason-Dixon line, it was “Camptown Races” and “Dixie” and “Ol’ Man River,” and she joined in till the sound of their voices intertwined beat back the roar of the open windows. The road was blinding, mesmeric. Everything came at her in a blast of sensation, everything new every time she opened her eyes, and they didn’t even think about the two doses of the sacrament Tim had pressed on them before he left because they didn’t need them, or not yet, not till they got there.

They left the car at the airport in Monterrey, and no, they didn’t have time for sightseeing, not even for the cathedral the guidebook was pushing or the limestone caves Corey was fixated on, because they were in a hurry now, a mad anticipatory rush to get to the Catalina Hotel—Tim’s hotel—slip into their bathing suits, pick coconuts and just let go. The flight was on a Mexican air service nobody had ever heard of, but it was cheap, and if she had any reservations she just strapped herself in and swallowed them. There was the rattling dual-propeller airplane, the pilot who smiled through the heavy brush of his mustache as if this plane and this sky were the funniest things in the world, then the patchwork of the mountains and finally the dense green vision of Zihuatanejo and the blue transparency of the sea that hugged it close.